I have mostly three computers – one stable Gentoo server, one ~amd64 Gentoo workstation, and one laptop. Since I rarely use the laptop at home, I decided to install a binary distribution on it.
I do not like to frequently reinstall operating systems. I like also having very new software, deciding to install new versions in the week of upstream release. The distribution also should be user-friendly, i.e. help them control it instead of controlling them by unneeded packages and hidden configurations.
The first criterion limits my choice to very few GNU/Linux distributions (I did not try to use any other, better, kernel due to bad experiences with hardware support in the past). After reading an entry on Caleb Cushing’s blog I decided to try using Debian. Previously I knew about some of its important advantages – very stable releases (not appropriate on my laptop), large number of available packages (like on Gentoo or FreeBSD) and support for some forks encouraging free software (cdrkit, IceWeasel).
I though that there are Debian Sid installation discs. Since I could not find them, I used testing discs. During installation the only problem was lack of wireless network support (after some updates it worked with the ath5k driver). The only one, before I noticed that it installed KDE 3.
Unlike Gentoo with its several slots per package name, Debian names each library differently for each ABI. For non-library packages the same name is used. Confusingly, kwin was changed into a more descriptive name, but the package manager did nothing with this. The library situation led to using three versions of GCC, but this is not a problem when my laptop does not compile them.
After removing many unneeded packages (mostly from KDE 3) and installing needed ones, I noticed that TeXLive is available still in version 2007. It is caused by different packaging in version 2008. For Gentoo this was not a problem, they just keep it without updates. Maybe this will improve before TeXLive 2011.
In Gentoo the rc system is simple and easy to configure. In Debian removing hundreds of unnecessary packages did the job, but I still do not understand why so many runlevels are used there. I also do not know how to avoid having NetworkManager put useless domain name in /etc/resolv.conf, in Gentoo I just edited some configuration files instead of using NetworkManager.
Still, I believe that these problems may take less time than updating a source-based distribution.
