Gentoo -> Fedora 9
I just switched my laptop from Gentoo to Fedora 9.
I always liked portage, and continue to prefer it over any other package management system. Unfortunately, network effect is a big factor in the usefulness of modern Operating Systems. In the open source community, this is even more noticeable. As more users flock to or, in the case of Gentoo, away from a Linux distribution, the quality of the software packages available for the distribution fluctuates. In the case of Gentoo, this was very noticeable in the lack of package updates when major updates to specific applications were released.
What compounded this was the lack of interest in certain tools by the remaining development team. For me, the greatest example was the lack of ebuilds (Gentoo software packages) for Miro and Twitter clients. Though these applications provided relatively new functionality, video podcast playback and micro-blogging, their omssion hinted at a larger problem. The current development team was not interested in including these applications in the distribution. It left me wondering if the development team was larger, could Gentoo provide these newer applications in a more timely manner, when they were even included.
I considered creating the ebuilds I needed myself, but in the end realized that I wouldn’t be able to maintain more then a few ebuilds regularly. These few packages wouldn’t be enough to make Gentoo appealing to me.
In the end its hard to say if what I saw was a significant problem. It could be easily argued that the quality of a distribution is not in its breadth of its application library but in its stability and capabilities at specific tasks. For me, the bleeding edge Gentoo I was drawn too is no longer there. In its place is a slower to update distribution which still occasionally breaks functionality with updates. I hope portage or the ideas behind it are passed on to other open source projects, I believe there is a lot of benifits to source code based distribution.