Well, as I said last month, after fighting and fighting with Ubuntu for a while, I finally gave up on Ubuntu with last month's stupid stupid stupid upgrade problems, and decided to backup my personal files to an external harddrive and play with a few other OSes to figure out which one fit best.
So I pulled down a copy of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, and after much fighting with the installer, got it installed with a geli(8) encrypted root. After playing around for a while (and fighting more and more with Xorg and syscons(4)) I fell in love with a wonderous little part of the BSD system called Ports.
Ports. Ports, ports, ports, ports. I can't believe how much I had been missing in the programs I was running all these years. The level of customization and optimization from building from source! It's just too much to bear! I have to have it now. Debian is no longer sufficient, I'm afraid -- at least for workstations. Unfortunately, BSD itself is sadly far too lacking in functionality and design. I admit, I am doing a bit of bikeshedding here, but the console does not have a sane idea of what 'meta' and 'alt' are at all. There were other issues as well with regard to how the system was configurable, and how much hardware support was available. To be honest, FreeBSD is too stable for my needs. So I remembered Gentoo and portage -- so that's what I'm running now.
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