Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Oct 31, 2009 1:30 UTC (Sat) by csigler (subscriber, #1224)
Parent article: Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Wow. I thought the "Gentoo is for r1c3r5" meme was played out by the end of 2006 *chuckle*

I used Debian faithfully for my personal workstation and server for 9 or 10 years. The introduction of "testing" back in the old days kept me from switching much earlier. I supported mostly Red Hat and Mandrake ("Get off my lawn!") at work.

I switched to Gentoo about 3 years ago and haven't looked back (although there was one short bumpy patch). I left Debian because I kept having dependency problems installing cutting-edge versions which I needed of some apps, and testing just wasn't keeping up with my requirements.

Every distribution has its own learning curve, and I'd dare to say that Gentoo's is a little higher than others (esp. Ubuntu). In addition, Gentoo configuration is different from other distributions, so you'll be learning some new stuff to get things working the way you want. But the advantages to me have been that:

- Community support and bugtracking is pretty good, so I can get help or find out how to fix things.
- Once I understood things better, I could fix my own problems.
- There are dependency problems, but they're easy to understand and resolve in almost every case.
- It Just Works(TM).

Just my 2 cents.

Clemmitt

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Oct 31, 2009 4:10 UTC (Sat) by Holmes1869 (guest, #42043) [Link] (5 responses)

I agree completely. Mandrake/Mandriva user since 2001. Switched to Gentoo when I built my new (cause I knew compiling would be brutal ;) dual processor Opteron back in April 2006, and haven't even been tempted to look back. The learning curve is HUGE, but I learned a TON about Linux in general, which was my main motivation for switching. I feel that all the hand-holding of Mandrake kept me blind to some of the more ugly/beautiful things about raw GNU/Linux.

Enough of that. Anyway, after 3.5 years, why am I so happy with it? I'm running the latest versions of KDE, X, and the kernel, but I never had to really "upgrade". It's much more time-consuming, but it's great to be using the latest software through tons of incremental upgrades over many years, instead of a possibly disruptive large one.

Not surprised that Gentoo did better overall on the benchmarks. I don't use it for the speed, but I've never noticed any speed hiccups either.

Back to Debian

Posted Nov 1, 2009 23:45 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Not that anyone should particularly care, but my story is quite different: I was unfaithful to Debian when I tried Gentoo for a while (partly looking for performance for some 3D work I was doing at the time, partly out of curiosity). But it served me well as I soon got bored: my usual "apt-get update" + "apt-get upgrade" routine that took 2 minutes become an annoying "emerge world" which took anything from 30 min to several hours. After the third time recompiling OpenOffice.org (just for the fun of it, I guess) I went back to Debian and haven't looked back since.

Actually I tried OpenSuse for a while and would like an excuse to install Fedora or CentOS. But I always go back to Debian. There is something magic in being a sysadmin with so little effort: on some of my machines I run stable and have automated security upgrades, and it works without a hitch.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 13:43 UTC (Mon) by Tuxie (guest, #47191) [Link] (1 responses)

I was a Gentoo user for 7 years (since before v1.0) but I switched to Arch about a year ago and I haven't looked back. Arch has most things I liked with Gentoo but uses binary packages by default and AUR, its community repository (which is source-based like portage) is generally more up-to-date and better maintained than Gentoo has been in the last years.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 5, 2009 4:31 UTC (Thu) by roy.hu (guest, #61386) [Link]

I totally agree that Arch Linux hit the sweet spot between binary-based
distros and source-based distros.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 15:38 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

I switched to Gentoo somewhere around 2001-2002 because it was more user
friendly than Linux From Scratch.

Gentoo Optimizations Benchmarked (Linux Magazine)

Posted Nov 2, 2009 21:19 UTC (Mon) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link]

I'd like to second that.

Gentoo is about being able to tweak every component in your system to your heart's content (including but in no way limited to CFLAGS). Why would you want to do that? Well for me it was because I'm interested in knowing how things work. I have learned a whole lot about Linux systems in general. I acknowledge that some people are quite happy that they don't need that kind of knowledge. But it interested me and Gentoo makes it fun and easy not to lose your way in the details.

However, I did find some bugs in GTK+ that appearently were triggered by my choice of CFLAGS as other people weren't able (nor willing) to reproduce them. So yes, Gentoo should be seen as a valuable resource for testing combinations of weird configure-time options.