Comment Re:Article writer without a clue (Score 1) 239
I've been using gentoo for a few years now and, while I do agree with most of your points, I disagree with #3 and #5.
Nice rhetoric on #3 btw, but having to build an entire distro from scratch teaches you a whole hell of a lot about how linux works. It's because it forces you to use the command line more than many other distros and the fact that the user sees how the pieces of the OS fit together via the use flags, compile order, and the output of the makefiles that you're so fond of.
So the "huge community of people" might be a bit of a hyperbole, but it's not like you have to knock gentoo to make Debian look better. The documentation of gentoo really is fantastic because it needs to be for non-developers to use it. Gentoo's forums have a wealth of helpful information and on several occasions I've read users of other distros say that a fix posted by a gentoo user helped them on their distro of choice. Many developers post regularly in the forums and I've found it much easier to find useful information there than when I was searching through the Fedora forums. Fedora likely does have many more users, but I would guess it to have a higher percentage of new users who haven't done as much reading and don't know the inner workings of linux because they don't have to. Gentoo does have some ricers with CFLAGS so long you'd think they were overcompensating for their penis size, but most of the users I've interacted with are level-headed, knowledgeable, and quite helpful since they remember what it was like to be stuck at a terminal when X won't start, etc.
Gentoo's not the first distro I've used and it isn't the last either. Ubuntu's really nice too and it's a lot easier to help friends out with than gentoo has been in my experience. :) I like gentoo because it's extremely configurable and flexible and I like Ubuntu because it's slick and easy to set up and maintain. Let's not distro war too much. ;)
Nice rhetoric on #3 btw, but having to build an entire distro from scratch teaches you a whole hell of a lot about how linux works. It's because it forces you to use the command line more than many other distros and the fact that the user sees how the pieces of the OS fit together via the use flags, compile order, and the output of the makefiles that you're so fond of.
So the "huge community of people" might be a bit of a hyperbole, but it's not like you have to knock gentoo to make Debian look better. The documentation of gentoo really is fantastic because it needs to be for non-developers to use it. Gentoo's forums have a wealth of helpful information and on several occasions I've read users of other distros say that a fix posted by a gentoo user helped them on their distro of choice. Many developers post regularly in the forums and I've found it much easier to find useful information there than when I was searching through the Fedora forums. Fedora likely does have many more users, but I would guess it to have a higher percentage of new users who haven't done as much reading and don't know the inner workings of linux because they don't have to. Gentoo does have some ricers with CFLAGS so long you'd think they were overcompensating for their penis size, but most of the users I've interacted with are level-headed, knowledgeable, and quite helpful since they remember what it was like to be stuck at a terminal when X won't start, etc.
Gentoo's not the first distro I've used and it isn't the last either. Ubuntu's really nice too and it's a lot easier to help friends out with than gentoo has been in my experience.
