the corner office

I came pretty close to draining the Gentoo rice paddy this evening. I've been a devout user for nearly 2 years, but it's been getting a bit much recently. It was a great learning experience in the beginning, but the marginal satisfaction return on the new things I'm learning is getting a little slim these days. The final catalyst for my near-treason was this month's upgrade, though. It was hard-masked hell trying to get various bits and pieces lined up so I could keep using Java 5. Then when I finally got that sorted out, I got to see the download list, and I need to haul down nearly 400 megs of source code. It'll take ages to download, blowing my ADSL cap in the process, and the compiling will take even longer.

Some of my colleagues have been having fun with Ubuntu, and it looks really impressive. That, combined with the long-standing recommendations of people whose judgement I respect, and its general popularity and support, means it's been looking mighty attractive recently. That, and Mark Shuttleworth is Sefrican, and must be Adoringly Supported.

Then I started digging around, and learned that AMD64 support in Ubuntu ain't too great for 32 bit apps. I decided that Gentoo may have its faults, but having to jump through hoops to run 32 bit code isn't one of them. If the laptop thing happens (still procrastinating), it's likely to be an Intel machine, and I'll try Ubuntu on that. Until then, I'll stick with Gentoo, despite its quirks.

I'm about 100 megs into the downloads...