[wellylug] Gentoo

[Jamie Baddeley]

On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 01:44 +1300, David Antliff wrote:
> 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.

That's a great summary David. Thanks.

jamie