[wellylug] Gentoo

[David Antliff]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2005, Jamie Baddeley wrote:
> but seriously, what are your motives for selecting gentoo?
>
> what perceived advantages do you think it has?

Consider this: much of what makes up the Gentoo distribution is 
bleeding-edge software. Combined with a successful and widely used bug 
reporting system, it is often the first distro to discover bugs and 
security issues in this software. I think it's fair enough to conclude 
(although I have no numbers to actually prove this) that the quality of 
*all* other Linux distributions is improved by the existence (and 
popularity) of Gentoo. Sure, you might not like it yourself, but I believe 
it has it's place and is a very important citizen in the Linux world.

While I'm here - It's also false to state that Gentoo takes hours to 
install because of the 'compile from source' mentality. Gentoo supports 
pre-compiled binary packages too. The choice is entirely yours. You may 
even mix-n-match.

As for actual vs. perceived 'performance' increases - that's a contentious 
issue. There is evidence that the CPU optimisations *do* make a difference 
in benchmarks (and there are numbers that show this) but the reality is 
that most desktops and servers spend the majority of their time waiting 
for I/O anyway. Once again, you have the choice - how many of you have 
considered that the CFLAGS controls in Gentoo actually allow you to set 
even more conservative options than a typical 'server' distro? It 
goes both ways.

Then there's the Gentoo forums, which are an excellent place to find all 
sorts of Linux and Gentoo problems/solutions.

Gentoo is flexible enough to make it how you want it. It can be 
source-compiled, installed from packages, built for embedded systems - 
it's up to you. You'll learn a lot more about the workings of a Linux 
system from Gentoo than you typically will from Debian or Redhat, for 
example. I have also had more success compiling/installing 'external' 
applications with Gentoo than several other big-name distros, perhaps 
because Gentoo is increasingly becoming the 'developers OS of choice'. 
Creating new packages is very simple.

The installation might seem pretty daunting to a newbie, but it's actually 
pretty much the same steps you'd go through to install something like 
Debian, but without the fancy front-end. There's little technically 
challenging about installing Gentoo. Most packages are simply 'emerged' 
and their default configuration sufficient. Tricky hardware has to be 
sorted out with any distro. Besides, I'm sick of people complaining about 
installation - you only do it a finite number of times, and usually only 
once. At least if something goes wrong or you need to do something 
differently you have the access and tools to sort it out (anyone remember 
that old Redhat installer bug where it went into an infinite loop making 
installation practically impossible. Can't remember what version but it as 
back around 1998).

One suggestion - don't use the official etc-update program, it's 
dangerous. Instead, edit /etc/dispatch-conf.conf (IIRC) and enable RCS, 
then use 'dispatch-conf' from now on to merge configuration files when 
upgrading packages.

If you haven't spent a reasonably amount of time with Gentoo, then you can 
be excused from properly understanding the flexibility and power that it 
provides. It takes time to discover what it can do for you. It's not 
everybody's favourite but it suits me great.

Please consider that Gentoo has it's place, even if you prefer to be 
elsewhere. Since when has it been wrong to try something new?

-- 
David.