Why do you love Gentoo ? (I love thread)

PunkFlag · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 9 Location: /home

I choosed Gentoo, cuz people advised me to do, so I can learn linux fast. There is a cool wiki that answers alot of my questions.

baigsabeeh · Posted: Wed Aug 09, 2006 8:57 pm Post subject:

I like Gentoo because of the freedom/customizability, portage system, and ease of maintenance. It may be more hands on than any distro out there, but I've learned more about Linux in my 1 year of Gentoo than I have in my prior three years of switching between FC and Mandrake and Slackware. I also love the speed. I recently upgraded to GCC 4.1.1 and Glibc 2.4.3, actually yesterday, and it was a breeze to install and then I optimized my entire system as well and tweaked it for some more performance increases. I upgraded it a couple of days ago and then I rebuilt it earlier this morning.

Gentoo has left me with a golden taste for Linux that can't be taken away. I tried to switch to Ubuntu a month ago and I couldn't do it. Ubuntu may be easy to install, but it's crippled in comparison to Gentoo and I just came crawling back.
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FantomKnight · Posted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 3:55 am Post subject:

I love Gentoo for two reasons - flexibility and the forums. Gentoo is the most flexible distro that I have ever used. Not only can I pick and choose which packages I want to use, but I can pick and choose right down to the specific version. I can even get the latest test version if I want. And, when I update, I am not forced to update to a version that I don't want. Furthermore, if I don't want a package to be compiled with support for stuff that I'll never use, I can do that too! Also, the forums are the most helpful of any distro that I have ever used. I can usually find a solution to any problem that I am having within just a few minutes simply by searching the forums.

menschmeier · l33t Joined: 15 Dec 2004 Posts: 727

I really love it because ...

(Almost) Everything is working on my Samsung P30 laptop, before I tried SuSE, Mandrake, ... I always got in trouble when upgraded the system make acpi working. I spent hours an days to make it run, sometime I wasn't able to make it run. With Gentoo the upgrading process is continuously. And everything is working out of the box. When I set up set system it took some hours, maybe a day. But I never got in trouble following the excellent handbook. Since then I got only one time really in trouble. With the support of other Gentoo users here in the forum I solved all the difficulties that came along.

Using Gentoo I learned so much about a Linux system, how it works in detail - not because I must have to to run Gentoo. Clicking aroung in GUI to do the configuration like I did before isn't that instructive. The time I spent on Gentoo wasn't wasted for solving just a problem.

Of course Gentoo has some stumbling blocks. Portage is easy to use but can be quite complicate to configure. There is a lot you can do in /etc/portage/ and /etc/portage/profile. But this is the price for the flexibility and I like to pay it willingly.

So my summary is:
+ took longer to setup but saves a lot of time mantaining it
+ everything works
+ excellent documentation
+ excellent forum here
+ system seems to be faster because everything is compiled/optimized for my CPU
+ got me a better understanding about Linux systems

menschmeier
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sommersg · n00b Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 65

Installing it made me love it. I learned more unix/linux than ever before. Also, knowing exactly what's actually running on my system is very nice (and the absence of overhead). Portage is excellent. And um... the color scheme. And of course my best bud larry.

sommersg · n00b Joined: 24 Jul 2006 Posts: 65

Oh, and most important having a community that truely knows their sh*t.

iraedei · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2006 Posts: 1

at first it was a headache; but then i found an endless supply of documentation on fixes and installation. its endless. also, portage is a god-send. and there seems to always be a fix and an answer to every problem. at first i cursed the name 'Redspot' my friend who convinced me to go gentoo and now i send him many thanks
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anyNiXwilldo · Apprentice Joined: 20 Feb 2004 Posts: 176 Location: US

1. Speed/ responsiveness - I don't care what anyone says, Gentoo is faster and more responsive than any binary distribution I have ever used.

2. USE flags - Kuroo presently shows I have exactly one entry in the GNOME category, which is libgsf. I don't know of any other distribution that allows me to block gnome libraries in this manner and to this extent.

3. Easy installation of beta versions of software.

4. Split KDE builds - I don't need 3 text editors and 5 IRC apps. With Gentoo, I can build KDE as I choose, without including the hundreds of KDE apps I will never use, which would only serve to klutter up my menus. (I used DO_NOT_COMPILE_ before Gentoo split the KDE builds, which wasn't as fine grained as the split builds are, IMO.) Every time I hear someone else claim KDE is bloated, my first thought is, why are you using the wrong distro? (And don't get me started on Arch Linux including kpackage, when Arch hasn't even adapted kpackage to pacman, which means the app is completely useless on Arch, so why include it?)

5. Mostly unmodified source packages - With Gentoo's KDE, I get KDE as close to the original release as possible. Have you seen the abominations that some distributions do to the KDE menus? (I won't mention any names.) Gentoo's split KDE ebuilds allows me to do a minimal amount of tweaking to get my menus exactly how I like them.

6. Gentoo is the first, and only distribution, to allow me to set up my system EXACTLY how I want it, down to specifying exactly which drivers will, and will not, be built.

I couldn't ask anything more from any OS. There's nothing else out there like Gentoo, as far as I'm concerned.
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mimosinnet · Posted: Sat Aug 12, 2006 10:36 am Post subject:

I have very little experience in Gentoo (few weeks now), not much on Linux (about a year ago), and very little on computing (my knowledge is from using computers and reading on the internet).

I approached Linux because its political appeal: create software that BELONGS to people.

When I started using linux (Mandriva) I was amazed at how much I learned on computing and how unberable became working with windows. Without being a computer expert I could start controlling and organizing my system and I was able to KNOW why things happened in certain ways. I have been an enthusiastic Mandriva user for a while, and I believe is an excellent distribution when abandoning windows. Nevertheless, its commercial orientation, lack of information of its own internal software and having things 'already decided for the user' pushed me to look for a different distribution.

The 'philosophy' and 'social contract' of gentoo appealed to me. When my Mandriva crashed las july (because of hardware failure) I started the gentoo' adventure. I have followed the EXCELLENT documentation and I now have a fully functional system that I (try to :wink:

) manage. I have learned A LOT in the few weeks, have more and more control over my system, and feel I participate in a political project it is worth fighting for. I do plan to stay with gentoo for a long time.

If Mandriva was fresh air compare to windows, I now feel in paradise.

I would like to thank the community for making this possible!!!