I am typing this post from within Yoper, a new distribution of GNU/Linux which I have just installed on my laptop. I’ve been using Linux in university for the best part of two years now, but I’ve never found a distro that I’ve really got on with for use at home. Fedora and Mandrake were always too bloated for me - they seem to take the approach of including every bit of software a user could ever possibly need, and as a result are bloated and take up a lot of space. I’ve also tried Slackware, which I love, but its hardware detection system isn’t really up to the task of making my laptop and all my peripherals work correctly, and its Packagetools package management system doesn’t take into account package dependencies, which is annoying. I’ve also briefly tried Gentoo, but got bored after spending 3 hours compiling X and then having to set it all up manually, when I had no idea of the specifications of my laptop’s LCD display. I needed a compromise.
In Yoper, I seem to have found one. The base system is a patched kernel optimised from scratch for i686 architecture (my laptop has a Pentium 4). It uses the Kudzu hardware detection system from Red Hat, package management from Debian (apt-get) and the Synaptic tool. It comes with only the necessary software to get you up and running, but it’s easy to install anything you need from Synaptic. It’s got its own configuration tool (Yoperconf) that pulls together the different tools it uses for modifying your settings.
I’m very impressed so far - it’s extremely fast and talks to most of my hardware without a problem. There are still a few things I’ll need to use Windows for, but I think I’ll be using Yoper a lot more in the future.
