SwansonMarpalum's Journal: RE: Gentoo Vitriol

People mentioned Red Hat approaching a system much like that used by Gentoo with their adoption of Fedora. Now to me this seemed wrong. Not wrong in any sense other than just inaccurate

Of course, folks on slashdot are glad to get whipped up over everything, but I didn't know I'd be hitting so many nerves when I posted my "rant". I felt there were core differences between Gentoo and Red Hat which could use addressing.

As such I communicated these differences as well as I felt I could, and the response was overwhelmingly: YOU ARE A ZEALOT!

Now, I don't feel Gentoo is a magic sword sent down from heaven to smite evil with. I like it and I find it personally compatible with my own priorities. So did alot of other folks. I've been running it for a while now on a K6-3 400 which I bootstrapped from stage one. Yes, it took well over 24 hours before I had a working system which I'm now using as a development platform. But it's a system optimized for my processor, an admittedly minor gain. However I feel that benefit will, over time, outweigh the cost incurred in compiling the system from source. I'm still waiting for leaving an update emerge in my crontab to break things horribly, but no such luck yet. It's working nicely thus far.

The system is set up with system configuration tools that make alot of sense and can simplify things, but still leave all the power in my hands. It's what I chose to use, and I tried to articulate why, and what set it apart from Red Hat. Certainly things may change for the worse, or may become better. In that case I can switch again. Furthermore people's largest gripe with Gentoo seems to be that you have to sit around compiling all kinds of source. Compiling source code is an activity which implicitly lends itself to parallelization. While it may not be viable for everyone, I have a large collection of old machines which collect dust. Perhaps leveraging these machines to speed compiles with a Gentoo cluster will be a good solution. Perhaps it is completely implausible. It's something to think about in the back of my mind.