Journal MC Negro's Journal: Gentoo died on a cross for your sins.
As I was browsing /. the other day, I came across yet another article that inadvertently turned into a Gentoo Praise-a-thon. Like most topics of the same nature, every Gentoo nerd crawled out from the cave they live in to sing praises to the first,er,second,er,well, one of the somewhat-original source-based distribution known as Gentoo. In addition to listing the previously unknown merits of the operating system, they of course offered up the first born child they will never have to the high God of Gentoo.
Now don't get me wrong; I love Gentoo. I've survived several installations of it, and love certain aspects of the operating system. It's really the community that I hate. Well, I lied. I hate part of the operating system as well. For the sake of carpal tunnel advocacy, let's list both of them for a thorough review --
Gentoo : The Operating System
I have no problem agreeing that Gentoo has some mighty fine features. Having a fresh portage tree and a selection of bleeding-edge software at your finger-tips is enough to make any penguin-hugger die in a pool of his own saliva. I also like the fact that Gentoo consistently has releases for non-x86 platforms, whereas most distros put non-x86 releases on the back-burner. +1 brownie point.
But, unless you're a cave-dwelling renegade against society (and have thus become totally oblivious to the Gentoo community), you've no doubt heard about the touted "emerge" feature of Gentoo. What is "emerge"? Well, emerge is a cute little program that takes an argument for an application, fetches the application, fetches the dependencies and compiles and installs it for you. Nice, huh? This is one of the "big guns" that the Gentoo evangelists will use against you. As anyone with a lick of perception would've guess, the majority of those who use "emerge" as a chip for bargaining have been totally oblivious to other efforts in the same vein that have been around for a hell of a lot longer than Gentoo. To be specific, Debian was an OG in the "RESOLVE-DEPENDENCIES-WHILE-U-WAIT-(FREE CABLE)" wars, with their wonderful tool, APT. APT does essentially what emerge does, except it fetches binaries instead of source. It's also available for other distros as well, not just Debian. But, since a 2% native-code speed gain is essential for all the jobs that a Gentoo user's task list entails, I've often had my Gentoo friends explain to me the manifold benefits of emerge over apt-get, and then proceed to expound on how Gentoo was truly innovative in the fine art of fetching source and resolving dependencies. I recall another breed of UNIX doing this long before Gentoo ever did. And with that OS, I don't have to recompile or apply patches every 2 weeks to prevent gross security exploits.
Again, don't get me wrong -- I love Gentoo. I just don't think it's nearly as innovative or as great as its proponents claim it to be.
Compiling from source does not make you a hacker.
Gentoo is for Ricers satirized the Gentoo community perfectly with its "Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!" tagline. I've come to the following conclusion -- either Gentoo users are extremely lazy or they are extremely naive and misinformed. In the case of the latter, often they will act as though some sort of other-worldly guru status is attained through watching programs compile. There's nothing really magical about watching make's output, which is why it baffles me when Gentoo whores act as though they've achieved the status of Linux guru because they were baby-stepped through an installation and subsequently emerged all the applications they needed. No brownie points or +1 respect modifiers. Write your own kernel, then we'll talk.
The other possibility is that they're just plain lazy. What the Hell is so hard about typing "./configure; make; make install; make clean"? Is Googling for a package really that hard? Is installing from a bundled CD just too much? Bah, willing to wait 4 days for a system to compile but when it comes to 5 minutes of Googling, it's just too much.
Gentoo : The Community
I detest the Gentoo community. I've got 3 friends who are constantly shoving Gentoo down my throat. It seems as though Gentoo users have been brainwashed into thinking that it is their personal responsibility to share the gospel of Gentoo with the unwashed masses. Some might call them "evangelists" for Gentoo. I prefer to call them "whores" for Gentoo. If they're not hijacking every Linux topic to start yet another irrelevant conversation on how problem x would be resolved with a simple "emerge" under Gentoo, they're preaching to you how Gentoo died for your many sins of installing an RPM-based distro.
Fundamentally, the problem with the Gentoo user community lies in this -- the vast majority of them are either whores or arrogant, misinformed morons. The two are not mutually exclusive. Everytime I read on /. or other forums where some Gentoo whore preaches about the "optimisations", I cringe, both from the spelling error and the knowing that the person most likely has no idea what an "optimisation" is. He's simply been recruited to preach about how great it is. Never let things like facts get in the way of good zealotry.
Indeed, this seems to be a bit of a weakness in most Gentoo advocates -- They don't actually know what the benefits of compiling native code are. They just know it's good. To Hell with however marginal it might be, IF YOU DON'T COMPILE EVERYTHING FROM SOURCE, YOU ARE NOT USING YOUR SYSTEM'S RESOURCES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT AND THUS ARE DAMNED TO HELL!!!
I recall one occasion where a fellow computer-science major (first year) was condemning me to Hell for using an RPM-based distro, laying down the law with such compelling arguments as "Gentoo is hardcore" and "Gentoo is faster" and "Gentoo is optimized". The first two aren't worth stepping to, but when I probed him on what exactly "optimized" entailed, I was met with a blank stare. As someone who's had the severe misfortune of working with Intel x86 assembly, I knew what he meant by optimization, but he, quite obviously, didn't. Is this kind of thing sounding familiar? It reeks of the ".NET will save our sins" arguments of a couple years ago, at least to me. Rather ironic that our Gentoo brethren have adopted the arguing skills from the disciples of the evil, archenemy of our Penguin Liberator.
Closing Thoughs
Personally, if I'm in no hurry to get a Linux system up and running, I'll use Slackware. Slackware doesn't have that hokey feel to it, but still compiles near everything from source. I haven't messed with Slackware since v. 8, so it's probably changed a bit since then. If you're looking for a source-based distro with some good documentation, I'd point you in that general direction, although LinuxFromScratch is great too if you've got the time.
My current system setup consists of the following --
Now don't get me wrong; I love Gentoo. I've survived several installations of it, and love certain aspects of the operating system. It's really the community that I hate. Well, I lied. I hate part of the operating system as well. For the sake of carpal tunnel advocacy, let's list both of them for a thorough review --
Gentoo : The Operating System
I have no problem agreeing that Gentoo has some mighty fine features. Having a fresh portage tree and a selection of bleeding-edge software at your finger-tips is enough to make any penguin-hugger die in a pool of his own saliva. I also like the fact that Gentoo consistently has releases for non-x86 platforms, whereas most distros put non-x86 releases on the back-burner. +1 brownie point.
But, unless you're a cave-dwelling renegade against society (and have thus become totally oblivious to the Gentoo community), you've no doubt heard about the touted "emerge" feature of Gentoo. What is "emerge"? Well, emerge is a cute little program that takes an argument for an application, fetches the application, fetches the dependencies and compiles and installs it for you. Nice, huh? This is one of the "big guns" that the Gentoo evangelists will use against you. As anyone with a lick of perception would've guess, the majority of those who use "emerge" as a chip for bargaining have been totally oblivious to other efforts in the same vein that have been around for a hell of a lot longer than Gentoo. To be specific, Debian was an OG in the "RESOLVE-DEPENDENCIES-WHILE-U-WAIT-(FREE CABLE)" wars, with their wonderful tool, APT. APT does essentially what emerge does, except it fetches binaries instead of source. It's also available for other distros as well, not just Debian. But, since a 2% native-code speed gain is essential for all the jobs that a Gentoo user's task list entails, I've often had my Gentoo friends explain to me the manifold benefits of emerge over apt-get, and then proceed to expound on how Gentoo was truly innovative in the fine art of fetching source and resolving dependencies. I recall another breed of UNIX doing this long before Gentoo ever did. And with that OS, I don't have to recompile or apply patches every 2 weeks to prevent gross security exploits.
Again, don't get me wrong -- I love Gentoo. I just don't think it's nearly as innovative or as great as its proponents claim it to be.
Compiling from source does not make you a hacker.
Gentoo is for Ricers satirized the Gentoo community perfectly with its "Watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight!" tagline. I've come to the following conclusion -- either Gentoo users are extremely lazy or they are extremely naive and misinformed. In the case of the latter, often they will act as though some sort of other-worldly guru status is attained through watching programs compile. There's nothing really magical about watching make's output, which is why it baffles me when Gentoo whores act as though they've achieved the status of Linux guru because they were baby-stepped through an installation and subsequently emerged all the applications they needed. No brownie points or +1 respect modifiers. Write your own kernel, then we'll talk.
The other possibility is that they're just plain lazy. What the Hell is so hard about typing "./configure; make; make install; make clean"? Is Googling for a package really that hard? Is installing from a bundled CD just too much? Bah, willing to wait 4 days for a system to compile but when it comes to 5 minutes of Googling, it's just too much.
Gentoo : The Community
I detest the Gentoo community. I've got 3 friends who are constantly shoving Gentoo down my throat. It seems as though Gentoo users have been brainwashed into thinking that it is their personal responsibility to share the gospel of Gentoo with the unwashed masses. Some might call them "evangelists" for Gentoo. I prefer to call them "whores" for Gentoo. If they're not hijacking every Linux topic to start yet another irrelevant conversation on how problem x would be resolved with a simple "emerge" under Gentoo, they're preaching to you how Gentoo died for your many sins of installing an RPM-based distro.
Fundamentally, the problem with the Gentoo user community lies in this -- the vast majority of them are either whores or arrogant, misinformed morons. The two are not mutually exclusive. Everytime I read on
Indeed, this seems to be a bit of a weakness in most Gentoo advocates -- They don't actually know what the benefits of compiling native code are. They just know it's good. To Hell with however marginal it might be, IF YOU DON'T COMPILE EVERYTHING FROM SOURCE, YOU ARE NOT USING YOUR SYSTEM'S RESOURCES TO THE FULLEST EXTENT AND THUS ARE DAMNED TO HELL!!!
I recall one occasion where a fellow computer-science major (first year) was condemning me to Hell for using an RPM-based distro, laying down the law with such compelling arguments as "Gentoo is hardcore" and "Gentoo is faster" and "Gentoo is optimized". The first two aren't worth stepping to, but when I probed him on what exactly "optimized" entailed, I was met with a blank stare. As someone who's had the severe misfortune of working with Intel x86 assembly, I knew what he meant by optimization, but he, quite obviously, didn't. Is this kind of thing sounding familiar? It reeks of the ".NET will save our sins" arguments of a couple years ago, at least to me. Rather ironic that our Gentoo brethren have adopted the arguing skills from the disciples of the evil, archenemy of our Penguin Liberator.
Closing Thoughs
Personally, if I'm in no hurry to get a Linux system up and running, I'll use Slackware. Slackware doesn't have that hokey feel to it, but still compiles near everything from source. I haven't messed with Slackware since v. 8, so it's probably changed a bit since then. If you're looking for a source-based distro with some good documentation, I'd point you in that general direction, although LinuxFromScratch is great too if you've got the time.
My current system setup consists of the following --
- Laptop -- SuSE 9.0 Professional / Windows XP Professional. SuSE has been a great distro for me. It has all the geek tools that I want (GCC3, perl, plethora of libraries and lots of IDEs) and the necessary tools I need to play in my university's Windows-based domain (samba client, LDAP tools, etc...)
- FreeBSD 5.2.1 NIS/Samba PDC server.
- RedHat 7.1 fileserver
- And one of these days I'll have my Linux router built
Gentoo died on a cross for your sins. More Login
Gentoo died on a cross for your sins.
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