Foresight Linux. · Apr 10, 02:17 AM
All right, so maybe it’s an abuse of my “power” to slam a distro (because you know I have millions of people reading this all waiting with ‘bated breath to hear what I have to say), but forget Foresight Linux.
I installed it without any trouble. It didn’t eat my MBR or anything, and GRUB did it’s job, but that’s about it. The GDM instance it started failed hard at getting even the basic dimensions of my screen, so it started at some ungodly huge resolution. I had to crash GDM just to copy my config over from the Gentoo install.
I won’t judge anyone for choosing to install a distro with a nice face built on it, but I thought that X’s auto-detection was pretty nice these days. In fact, on this system, I can rename my xorg.conf do startx and still get a workable VESA or nv driven desktop of the right resolution… so wtf?
Anyway, then the package management turned into a nightmare. Conary is not apt, yum, portage, or pacman. It’s following some crazy paradigm of its own… which is all right by me, if it worked. I managed to get ncurses installed, and git. But it didn’t come with GCC.
Not having dev tools built in is fine. That doesn’t bother me, the average GNOME user isn’t compiling C on a daily basis. But the fact that a GCC package was already installed (according to the graphical package manager), couldn’t be uninstalled, and included a bunch of libraries and a C++ preprocessor but not a single binary, really pissed me off. All the other packages I found were for C++ and Fortran support (which I don’t need), but those couldn’t be installed either.
The command line client, `conary`, denied the existence all together of a GCC package. After looking on the Foresight forums, I learned that I needed to install group-gnome-dist-devel or something, which conary and the graphical manager couldn’t seem to find. I would question that the entire thing was properly configured if git and ncurses didn’t install properly.
In addition, it seemed like every operation took forever. Each search in the graphical client took a minute or so. Apt-cache search responds immediately. Emerge -s takes longer, but never more than a couple of seconds. And I wasn’t aware that distributed package managers had to hammer some server every time they turn around.
I know that I’m missing something. I need to add a repo or something. Or read some documentation. Or the package manager got confused by some command I tried. But seriously, I don’t care. If I can’t read the manpage for your package manager and instantly know what I’m doing then I don’t want to bother. Command line interfaces for package managers are not hard. I just don’t want to have to learn yet another package manager just to get some bug ironed out in an obscure distro.
I got frustrated with the flickery desktop, awful theme, and confusing package management and, in the end, I decided this wasn’t worth my time.
If anyone reads this and wants to enlighten me on the brilliance of conary, my contact info is to the right. I’ll gladly fix the bug. Until then, I’ll put out a 4th beta sometime tomorrow. For now it’s sleep time.
— Jack Miller
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