On Tue, Mar 25, 2014 at 04:47:21AM +0000, Always Learning wrote:
My good experience is, I believe, very likely to be shared by many others around the world.
I think that much depends on what you're seeking to accomplish.
Most distributions, these days, will do an acceptable job of configuring a system for an end-user at installation. Those of us who've been around for a few years remember trying to get USB working, trying to get sound working, having to configure X by hand, and a lot of other hellish (but for some, immensely educational) experiences.
If, on the other hand, you're trying to throw up a server, things start getting more difficult. It isn't enough to say that the MTA configuration was acceptable out of the box, because if you're actually running your own domains, that simply doesn't come out of the box.
But at least with a MTA, you can pretty much configure it and forget it. Web servers always seem to need a bit of tweaking, just because this is your face to the world, or an important part of your infrastructure, and this often means experimenting with new software--like my ill-fated venture into horde.
And none of these configurations are intuitive. Postfix has way too many moving parts. I've got moderately decent anti-spam defenses up now and I'm basically hanging on to this configuration by the skin of my teeth. My apache configuration relies heavily on Include statements, repeating configurations for IP addresses and ports, and on my ability to use one domain as a template for another.
I doubt I have any of this stuff properly optimized for my server--and mysql is its own special case here, where if you keep following some guidance, you'll exceed the limits of your machine by a couple orders of magnitude. But in the meantime, you have to not let a system's poor performance drive you into making the problem worse.
If you've really ventured through all of this stuff, and into application layers and only had success, more power to you. I've found a few of my own limits along the way.