[lug] Ubuntu Firefox v10.0.x Sluggishness & Fix (rantish)

[Collins Richey]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:46 PM, Davide Del Vento
<davide.del.vento at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> PCLinuxOS is my flavor of choice. It's install once,
>>> update forever, and it works great on laptops
>
>> For rolling distros, there's also Linux Mint Debian Edition,
>
> How do (these) rolling release manage major updates of essential
> software? The reason I do not *ever* do distro-updates (but clean
> re-install, cherrypicking what I want to preserve) is that should
> essential software (e.g. the packet manager) break, you are
> stuck.

The essential key to success with rolling distros  (be they gento,
pclos, etc.) is frequent, continual maintenance. If you condition
yourself to running the updates every 2-3 weeks, you will have few if
any problems. I have run pclos for better than 2 years with lots of
major changes (including kde and kernels). Thee were only 2
significant problems in this period. One was self-inflicted, and the
other was due to incompaitibility with proprietary software.

I went through a period where I didn't pay any attention to the user
forums. A major upgrade to RPM was announced well in advance. When my
tri-weekly upgrades stopped working, I found the answer immediately in
the forums. The package manager required a simple, well-defined,
well-publicized restructure of the rpm database to deal with the new
version.

The other problem had to do with the chromium broswer and the flash
plugin. Flash simply stopped working properly under the latest
chromium. The vendor has stopped supplying much in the way of help for
linux. I used firefox for a while, but now I've switched to chrome.
According to internet reports, google will continue to supply flash
that works as a part of chrome.

Two problems in two years is not enough to make me want to go through
the hassle of "cherry-picking" and reinstalling my software base. The
looming disasters that you forecast just aren't real.

Sure, I won't get a few cutting edge things (like kernel 3.x) until
pclos have learned to deal with them, but that's pretty minor IMHO.

Enjoy,



-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.