Where does Gentoo fit in? [LWN.net]

Where does Gentoo fit in?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 13:07 UTC (Fri) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
Parent article: Which is the best distribution?

Gentoo is generating a LOT of community activity, due to its extremely
active user community. I agree (in general) with the conclusions of the
article on the big traditional distributions, and I can't point out one
category where Gentoo should definitely be included, because I simply
don't KNOW enough about it as there seems to be almost a conspiracy of
silence about it (witness this article, with it's general claims to review
"the best" in several categories, not even /mentioning/ Gentoo, even in a
warning, or a disclaimer of to little data, similar to that for Sun's
"Java"-Desktop), but I'd LIKE to know how it stacks up.

At this point, and claiming as it does that the opinion of the community
was included, the failure to mention Gentoo in the context of Linux
distribs could be considered as grave an error as was the light treatment
of Linux in business IT textbooks, as covered in a recent LWN story. Just
as I'd consider such a textbook author to have not done their homework if
they failed to consider Linux a mentionable OS (while mentioning MSWormOS
as /several/ OSs), someone that fails to consider Gentoo a mentionalble
distrib, in a story about "the best" Linux distribs, given the noise about
it in the community (look at LWN comments) and the fact that Slack WAS
mentioned, with far LESS activity, cannot IMO be considered to have done
their homework either.

Note that I'm saying this NOT as a Gentoo user, as I'm using Mandrake, but
as a Linux user curious to know what the author thinks of Gentoo, given
all the noise it generates, and seriously interested enough in it
presently to have installing it and learning it in a dual boot environment
with my current Mandrake, as my current project.

Duncan

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Where does Gentoo fit in?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 14:40 UTC (Fri) by ladislav (guest, #247) [Link]

The main reason for Gentoo being left out was that, originally, the article served as a response to a question from a general business publication. It just didn't seem fair to sell Gentoo to a person whose familiarity with Linux was, presumably, too limited.

Granted, this is LWN, so Gentoo could have been included. The question is, which category would it fit best? Daniel Robbins has yet to come out and say openly that Gentoo is ready for mission critical servers (in the past he was quoted on several occasions that other distribution would perhaps be more suitable for such tasks). Yes, there are many who do use Gentoo on servers, but most of those are advanced users who are capable of sorting out most problems that come their ways. Perhaps as a personal server? Maybe. But would I want to spend the best part of a day to get a Gentoo server up and running if I can have the same in minutes with Slackware or Debian?

That leaves us with a desktop, where we are talking not one day, but at least two days of compiling (OpenOffice took 36 hours to compile on this 1.4GHz P4 machine), before you get a fairly complete setup. Sure, you can install binaries first and recompile later in the background, but still... it is just an awful lot of work to get Gentoo up and running - great if you are a hobbyist with plenty of spare time on your hands, but maybe not that ideal in a business environment where you don't have the luxury to tie down the computers for two days. Even if you do, once you compile the stuff and get your desktop up and running the way you like it, you'll end up using the same applications as the business next door that chose Mandrake and had it all set up before tea time. To an average user, it matters little that the underlying Python power in Portage is so much more flexible and beautiful than urpmi when all he or she cares about is getting the work done with OpenOffice, Gnumeric, or whatever.

I used to be a big fan of source-based distributions and believed at one point that they would dominate the Linux distribution world in the future. I no longer hold that belief. While Gentoo is a fun distribution to tinker with and to learn the internals of a Linux system, it is not a panacea. Yes, it has addressed the package dependency problems often associated with binary distributions, but at the same time it introduced different kinds of problems - it's not rare to hear in forums that a small upgrade completely hosed somebody's Gentoo system.

Gentoo comes with a lot of power and that's why it has to be treated with caution. I would really only recommend it to OS enthusiasts and maybe to those who are interested in getting to know all there is about Linux.

Where does Gentoo fit in?

Posted Apr 9, 2004 17:52 UTC (Fri) by mmealman (guest, #9223) [Link]

I don't know that I'd recommend it to just "enthusiasts" and those interested in getting to know Linux, because as you've stated Gentoo is extremely powerful. I evaluated it for around a year and our company has switched from Debian to Gentoo on our servers because it offers a lot more for us.

The compile times really aren't much of a hit on a server environment, because the machines are powerful and you're not dealing with a lot of long compile times(like you would on a desktop). But on the corporate desktop(which we're looking into providing for our customers) we've hit on using either SUSE or Fedora Core for the reasons you've stated.

But on the server level if you have an expert staff it works very well.