Comment Re:Oh no, (Score 1) 489
I use Gentoo because...
a) I want to understand what's under the hood in Linux.
b) I want to have complete control over what is and is not installed or running on my systems. Gentoo turns on by default only the bare minimum of services required to boot to a login prompt. Anything else is controlled by you.
c) Their documentation is both easy to get to and very helpful, and their forums just simply rock.
d) Optimized compiles are golden on the PII 300 and PII 266 systems I currently run as secondary and tertiary desktop systems on my home LAN. These boxen would be otherwise unusable using a modern precompiled distro like Mandrake or Debian.
e) Kernel upgrades on the bleeding edge using genkernel are easy. All three of my boxen at home run on Linux kernel 2.6.3 (PII 266, PII 300, and PIV 1.7) and I love it. Even before genkernel, I could upgrade my kernel easily - genkernel just reduces the steps and takes care of initrd for me.
f) Dual boot with Windows (while a necessary evil in my home) is easy to set up as long as you follow the simple install docs accordingly.
g) It is insanely easy to stay current compared to other distros I've tried.
- Gentoo
# emerge sync && emerge -u world
# etc-update (if necessary)
Done. Sometime doing the above will do something that causes someting to break, but the Gentoo forums are so lively that a quick visit usually yields a thread that has a fix or a quick workaround, and I usually learn something more about Linux internals in the process.
- Any Debian based distro (MEPIS, Libranet, Knoppix, etc.)
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this could be wrong - it's been awhile ;))
Ok, that's pretty simple, but the stable branch is too old, and using the unstable branch would eventually hose the system more easily than Gentoo. Also, you have to update your sources.lst, which can be tricky.
- Mandrake
# urpmi ????????
I am sure that urpmi is a good tool (like apt-get), but it only installs rpm packages, and I had no idea how to get urpmi to point to something other than the install CD's (I know this is on the web somewhere, but why bother when Gentoo's defaults point to the bleeding edge already?). Using urpmi requires more learning and setup than I am willing to invest considering the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge tool. I know you can use apt-get with Mandrake, but I fear hosing the system in the same way I did with Debian without being able to recover easily. Besides, Mandrake hides too much of the internals for my taste.
- Red Hat/Fedora
I hate the dependency hell of RPM, so I haven't bothered. Same goes for the risks of apt-get.
Basically I like emerge way better than apt-get and urpmi, because I am way less worried I'm going to hose my system doing an 'emerge -u world' than I am using apt-get or urpmi. emerge protects my system from idiots like me, and I like that. ;-)
a) I want to understand what's under the hood in Linux.
b) I want to have complete control over what is and is not installed or running on my systems. Gentoo turns on by default only the bare minimum of services required to boot to a login prompt. Anything else is controlled by you.
c) Their documentation is both easy to get to and very helpful, and their forums just simply rock.
d) Optimized compiles are golden on the PII 300 and PII 266 systems I currently run as secondary and tertiary desktop systems on my home LAN. These boxen would be otherwise unusable using a modern precompiled distro like Mandrake or Debian.
e) Kernel upgrades on the bleeding edge using genkernel are easy. All three of my boxen at home run on Linux kernel 2.6.3 (PII 266, PII 300, and PIV 1.7) and I love it. Even before genkernel, I could upgrade my kernel easily - genkernel just reduces the steps and takes care of initrd for me.
f) Dual boot with Windows (while a necessary evil in my home) is easy to set up as long as you follow the simple install docs accordingly.
g) It is insanely easy to stay current compared to other distros I've tried.
- Gentoo
# emerge sync && emerge -u world
# etc-update (if necessary)
Done. Sometime doing the above will do something that causes someting to break, but the Gentoo forums are so lively that a quick visit usually yields a thread that has a fix or a quick workaround, and I usually learn something more about Linux internals in the process.
- Any Debian based distro (MEPIS, Libranet, Knoppix, etc.)
# apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (this could be wrong - it's been awhile
Ok, that's pretty simple, but the stable branch is too old, and using the unstable branch would eventually hose the system more easily than Gentoo. Also, you have to update your sources.lst, which can be tricky.
- Mandrake
# urpmi ????????
I am sure that urpmi is a good tool (like apt-get), but it only installs rpm packages, and I had no idea how to get urpmi to point to something other than the install CD's (I know this is on the web somewhere, but why bother when Gentoo's defaults point to the bleeding edge already?). Using urpmi requires more learning and setup than I am willing to invest considering the simplicity of Gentoo's emerge tool. I know you can use apt-get with Mandrake, but I fear hosing the system in the same way I did with Debian without being able to recover easily. Besides, Mandrake hides too much of the internals for my taste.
- Red Hat/Fedora
I hate the dependency hell of RPM, so I haven't bothered. Same goes for the risks of apt-get.
Basically I like emerge way better than apt-get and urpmi, because I am way less worried I'm going to hose my system doing an 'emerge -u world' than I am using apt-get or urpmi. emerge protects my system from idiots like me, and I like that.
