My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

Posted Sep 21, 2006 16:43 UTC (Thu) by ordonnateur (subscriber, #6652)
Parent article: My Gentoo odyssey (Linux.com)

Gentoo is a fine distribution if you want to learn how things work, but at the same time want something that can be used for day to day work.
When i first installed Gentoo around 4-5 years ago I wanted a lean system to run on old ex-desktop hw provide basic web serving for a teaching lab. It did the job well, later I set up a few laptops and workstations with X to use as my everyday machine.
Over the next few years Gentoo seemed to move away from that more practical form of LinuxFromScratch; it seemed to me that too much development effort was going into 'features' I didn't need, the appeal seemed to be to people who wanted tinker and add 'go faster stripes'.

Keeping Gentoo up to date is not usually difficult, but it is necessary to keep moving not too far behind the bleeding edge. Leave a system because it is working fine for a few months, then update for a security fix; suddenly there is a mess of dependencies and conflicts; "if you were wanting to be going there, I wouldn't be starting from here".

Two summers ago I was caught out when a necessary fix to Apache required a wholesale change to server configuration. It took a week to get my mod-rewrite working again.

Since then I have moved most boxes to Ubuntu. The learning experience with Gentoo was worthwhile, it made moving a critical server to FreeBSD much easier, but for everyday use I need something that just works.

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