Gentoo is ahead of the curve [LWN.net]

Gentoo is ahead of the curve

Posted Mar 20, 2003 9:38 UTC (Thu) by alspnost (subscriber, #2763)
Parent article: A quick look at Gentoo Linux

I've been using Red Hat for a few years, but I'm now switching to Gentoo and I'm totally converted.

Yes, you all know it's a "manual" installation job, and that you're going to be spending a lot of time compiling things, but this misses the point.

Gentoo does a lot of things differently and *better*. As the article mentioned, it takes a bit of getting used to, but their ways of managing perennial problems are elegant, well-thought out and a joy to behold. The /etc stuff, including modules, init scripts and runlevels, is very cool.

Bear in mind, also, that the source-based uber-optimisation aspect is really an aside. The fantastic portage system and dependency management would also work just fine with a binary distribution. Sure, you'd get less flexibility in terms of the binary packages having extra libraries compiled in, but you'd still get the other benefits.

Anyone out there with a powerful machine and a broadband or LAN connection should give Gentoo a try. You just might never look back ;-)

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Gentoo is ahead of the curve

Posted Mar 20, 2003 20:20 UTC (Thu) by stuart (subscriber, #623) [Link]

"The fantastic portage system and dependency management would also work just fine with a binary distribution."

That's why I use Debian. I don't care about 'uber-optimisation' besides if you only use it on a powerful machine then you negate the benefit of this optimisation as well.

In short I find Gentoo great for the reason that it keeps a certain sector of the community happy...leaving me to run Debian stable...it just works (TM).

Gentoo is ahead of the curve

Posted Mar 27, 2003 8:00 UTC (Thu) by DiegoCG (subscriber, #9198) [Link]

That's what i don't like of gentoo. Compilation is *required*.

Debian for example compiles everything for i386. That REALLY SUCKS
in things like libc, X, multimedia apps...

But the good of debian is it doesn't require you to recompile.
There're tools that allow you to recompile a package with
the optimizations you want easily (see apt-build).

That's what gentoo needs. But they can't provide binary packages for
everything given that their dependencies are dynamic.

Dynamic dependencies *sounds* good, but they don't really have a lot
of sense to me. Static dependencies that install you libraries that
you're not going to use seems good to me. What if your system changes?
If you've gentoo and you change a USE flag; you'd to recompile a
lot of packages that are affected by that USE flag.

Precompiled binary packages are COOL. That's something that
gentoo must understand if they want to extend their distro.

But sure, it's much better to have everything compiled for k7
that for i686. X must fly on those systems.