This week we’ve added VA-API support to the ffmpeg Snap, discuss installing all the distros in VirtualBox, bring you a new found love and go over your feedback.
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It’s Season 11 Episode 30 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
In this week’s show:
- We discuss what we’ve been up to recently:
- Martin has been adding VA-API support to the ffmpeg Snap.
- We discuss installing lots of Linux distros in VirtualBox.
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We share a New Found Lurve:
- And we go over all your amazing feedback – thanks for sending it – please keep sending it!
- Yasha code generator
- Image credit: Martin Reisch
That’s all for this week! You can listen to the Ubuntu Podcast back catalogue on YouTube. If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, or you have any feedback on previous shows, please send your comments and suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet us or Comment on our Facebook page or comment on our Google+ page or comment on our sub-Reddit.
- Join us in the Ubuntu Podcast Telegram group.
Just to speak up in defence of Gentoo, as general Desktop distribution… In interests of balance. ๐
Gentoo is a distribution where you get an end-user experience proportional to the length of time you’ve been using it. If you’re used to binary distributions then it will be a bit of an uphill battle, even your an experienced packager for them. The is specially so in the first 1-3 YEARS of Gentoo usage. ๐
The Gentoo portage emerge package manager is significantly more advanced then apt / aptitude. Try calling apt (or aptitude) again – when package installations are still in progress from an earlier call to these commands! It’s a pretty unique distribution. For tweakers it’s invaluable – the facility to apply user patches to most ebuild package is great for quickly applying fixes to Upstream bugs. Making it easier to ride the “bleeding edge”.
In my experience Ubuntu has many annoyances… Especially when you have to pull packages from PPA’s. PPA packages typically aren’t built against pre-release Ubuntu versions. This isn’t an issue with Gentoo. Overlay’s (equivalent of third party repositories) integrate more tightly with the main Portage tree. Also my experience of Ubuntu is that when something breaks, it is much harder to patch and rebuild packages, with Upstream fixes.
Sure Gentoo is slow to install packages – due to compilation time… Try building on a dual core CPU (even with hyper-threading) – it is leads to pretty long build times for the more bloated packges. But Gentoo is generally a case of “set it and forget it” – leaving compiles to run when you are AFK. Where as, by contrast, Arch Linux’s AUR – needs constant user input and fiddling about. Typically I find I get annoying gpg errors and significantly more compilation failures – even with a mere handful of AUR packages installed. Due to Arch Linux’s binary package versioning – you also get installation failures with AUR packages that lag behind the main tree versioning.
Gentoo also has all the issues that community run distributions have. E.g. internal developer (and end-user) conflicts have led to mass developer exoduses, in previous years. I’ve found the Gentoo community pretty friendly myself – but everyone’s experience will vary – especially if you sign up as an official Gentoo maintainer.
Gentoo packaging is dependent on the time availability and skill of the maintainers for subsystems. E.g. Java packaging is pretty crap IMHO (where is the OpenJDK package?)
Just my rambling $0.02.
Hi guys. With all the talk of vms in episode 30 — have any of you tried AQEMU or other QEMU frontend? I got fed up with VirtualBox due to issues over the years. I find AQEMU ideal for the most part – unfortunately it’s a bit old now.