Why do you use Gentoo

welp · Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 5:47 am Post subject:

I like it for a couple of reasons...

Hmm, i think that's about it... there's probably a whole load of sub-conscious reasons too, but... they're subconscious, so meh

_________________
Gentoo/BSD, Gentoo/Alt AT and Bugday lead
AMD64, Xfce, Sunrise, www-servers, net-irc, lang-misc, Artwork
If you find a bug, submit it! Bugzilla

Gotterdammerung · Posted: Mon Sep 18, 2006 2:43 pm Post subject:

Community
Documentation
Portage + emerge
_________________
A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

GWilliam · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2005 Posts: 350

#NULL

GWilliam · Guru Joined: 29 Dec 2005 Posts: 350

#NULL

Gotterdammerung · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 12:38 pm Post subject:

hitachi · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 1:21 pm Post subject:

It is runnig! Win is not! That*s why I choose it in the first time. Now I am beginning to love it.

Penguin of Wonder · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:52 pm Post subject:

I use Gentoo for a lot of reasons, some good, some bad, some are terriable shallow, some may not be.

1.) I use Gentoo because I can't swear to it, but I always feel like my Gentoo installs are more stable.
2.) They have less problems to take care of out of the box.
3.) They are extremely bare bones which allows me to install only what I want to install and/or need to install.
4.) The excellent documentation on www.gentoo.org and the Gentoo Wiki are also two excellent reasons I use Gentoo.
5.) The Gentoo forums probably have the smartest group of users I've ever in encountered during my time in Linux. Thats the truth to, not a suck-up coment in the least. I can't honestly say you guys are any nicer than any other community, but you definatly know linux better.
6.) Gentoo makes me feel smarter.
7.) Gentoo also teaches me a lot about Linux.
8.) I like the idea my software is compiled for my computer. (I've heard this means a lot and I've heard it dosen't mean much at all, but either way I still like it, if nothing else I like the idea of it.)
9.) Portage is easy to use, easy to figure out, and fun to brag about.
10.) Gentoo devs actually respond to my questions.
11.) People on the bugzilla are generally nice.
12.) Portage has thousands of packages waiting for me to use.
13.) Gentoo is free (as in some kind of free).
14.) I actually feel like I'm part of the community.
15.) What I say actually means something (every now and then).

Thats all I got.
_________________
My Linux Blog

AMD64 3700+
2G DDR 3200 Ram
320G HDD

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

Gentoo works better than other distros I've tried. I like the wide choice of packages also.
_________________
Obligatory hompage link.

vanten · n00b Joined: 08 Jan 2006 Posts: 44 Location: Sweden

OK. First of all, it feels great to read through all the posts that are already been written, feels like a big family and, like being home

I personal love:

_________________
.: GNU/Linux :: Gentoo :: Fluxbox :.
.: BSD :: OpenBSD :: Fluxbox :.

bol · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006 12:56 pm Post subject:

The story of my life.. Not exactly, but my experiences behind the keyboard anyway.

I can't remember the year when i first tried linux, but it was arond 1999-2000 something.
And Red Had took virginity on a 200mhz p1 box. It was a pain with KDE, crappy hardware and lack of time duing studies, but i tried it anyway and experineced RPM-hell.
Later on, when i dumped Red Hat, i tried Mandrake, but it was the same mess, (it needed too much hardware, rpm).

Further on, a friend introduced me to Slackware, and i thought; This is great! Simple, (KISS) configurable, and could be customized to run on old hardware.
But i probably got on my friends nerves when asking alot of questions in the beginning.. (I couldn't find the man command)

Used it for a/couple of years, but started to get tired of the pain in the a** to maintence, so i found this project: emerde wich was/is a clone of emerge to slackware.
Tried it for some weeks, but it messed up my system totally (early beta), so i decided to try Gentoo.

It wasn't easy to install the first time, but a few tries i got it running.

And now im probably stuck..

My list:

And last, but not least, i also like to compile my own binaries

bitpicker · Posted: Wed Sep 20, 2006 2:01 pm Post subject:

Can't add much to what has been said already.

Before Gentoo I had a SuSE 9.1, but in name only. I had escaped rpm hell by fiddling with that system so much that rpms and SAX2 wouldn't work anymore, and I had already taken to compiling things by hand. Gentoo simply seemed to be the most prudent move when my harddisk died and took that SuSE 9.1 Frankenstein with it.

Gentoo has taught me much, and shown me how much more I don't know. I won't even pretend that I am in absolute control of what's going on, but I do have more control than I used to, and that's enough for me. I'm no longer scared by kernel updates or anything I wouldn't have touched before. I've got things to work by fiddling around, reading the forum and asking questions there (I try to read first and ask second) which I wouldn't have and mostly still can't in any other distro.

It's true, Gentoo also gave me problems I wouldn't even have had nightmares about with any other distro, like for instance me choosing wrong (or rather, suboptimal) CFLAG settings on my first install, which forced me to re-emerge everything (took me three days) when gcc and java were updated, but I came out the other end with a still running system. What a ride!

Robin

ese002 · Apprentice Joined: 20 Sep 2006 Posts: 153

There are certainly easier distros for normal stuff and if that is enough, I can't see why anyone would put up with the hassle that is gentoo.

But I'm always doing a few things that are a little unusual. I find that binary distributions are easy easy easy up until the point where I need something normally provided. Then my only option is to step outside of the distribution and build what I need from scratch. At that point there is little to no documentation or support and integrating my changes with the rest of the distribution can get awkward.

Gentoo evens things out a bit. Easy stuff is harder but hard stuff is easier and very hard stuff becomes tractable. Chances are, if anyone has blazed the trail and documented how it was done, he/she was a gentoo user.

geniux · Veteran Joined: 19 Feb 2004 Posts: 1400 Location: /home

ese002 · Apprentice Joined: 20 Sep 2006 Posts: 153

KrAmEt · Posted: Thu Sep 21, 2006 11:44 pm Post subject:

its the best

psyqil · Advocate Joined: 26 May 2003 Posts: 2767

syouth · Apprentice Joined: 18 Sep 2004 Posts: 275

steinarne · n00b Joined: 31 Aug 2004 Posts: 10

i find it easier than ubuntu (ubuntu is made so simple I find it to *hard* , and faster, and it the first distro ever working as I! want it to!

_________________
Laptop Amilo 7600 A - Fully working Gentoo laptop

<3 Xfce4 <3
K8N Neo4 Amd64X2 4600+ Dualbooting winxp (due to gf) / Gentoo 32bit.
Want to learn it all-

Penguin of Wonder · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 12:42 am Post subject:

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 3:40 am Post subject:

I admit it. I tend to be a control freak. Gentoo plays into that nicely.

_________________

alkan · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 8:18 am Post subject:

I tried a bunch of them (suse,redhat,mandrake....). It was a real hassle if i wanted something out of distro or some little customization (suse anyone?). This script calls that and that calls another and another does something god knows what... I couldn't able set a simple environment variable nor compile my own kernel. I still remember the hell i went through trying to install a different version of gcc.

Then i said I'll compile my own system from scratch and did LFS. Then I heard about gentoo is doing that via portage. I tried and fell in luv at first boot. Gentoo lets me do whatever i want with my system. This is why i stick with it.

kopp · Posted: Sat Sep 23, 2006 11:06 am Post subject:

Well, I stick with Gentoo because of the community, I love being there, we have fun, we discover new things, there is always some around to help those who need it. The doc and wiki are also really helpful. And I love the way it works, the utils and all. Two month ago I tried Debian on an old computer, but I'm so used to Gentoo and Portage that I couldn't work with it

I'm sure Gentoo casted a spell on me so that I can't use any other distribution now

pteppic · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2005 Posts: 781

There were two things that really amazed me when I first installed (stage 1 amd64 ~2004).
All the stuff that was a real PITA to get working properly in other distros (ie vmware, sometimes mp3/avi support, bluetooth, nvidia drivers) just worked out of the box, straight away. Well maybe it wasn't that simple, but if I read and follow a set of instructions, and at the end the result is the required one, then I think it's simple.
The second thing was, because everything was complete (not split up into x-pkg x-devel and y-pkg y-devel), when it came to compiling stuff I had patched myself, I didn't have to go through this ./configure >> guess at missing libs >> install them >> ./configure routine, at the time for me it was a real breath of fresh air.

It was about 3 months later I realized there were some other great benefits, portage's package list was huge, I think there were like 3 packages installed that weren't in portage, and like I said before, they were custom patched anyhow.
Any problems I had come across were pretty minor and/or well talked about on the forums, or in the huge gentoo wiki pages.
I didn't have to wait for someone to make the amd64 version of a package, and post it in a 3rd party repository, just play with portage a bit and it mostly worked (~95% of the time)
I stumbled across mplayer-bin, OMG, win32codecs working on and 64bit machine, that was a real bonus at the time, no other distro I'd come across had really paid any attention to this, and it was always hit and miss when they had.

At this stage Gentoo had my loyalty, I did some more research, and converted the 2 other machines in the house, and the laptop over to Gentoo.

The install time was still bugging me a bit for a full desktop machine, and when I had to build up a new machine for downstairs (media PC for the living room) I thought it would be quicker to use a binary distro. Well after fixing all the PITA things (nvidia, -dev packages for custom builds etc) I had spent as much time on it as I would have installing Gentoo, and it kept crashing.
I kicked said binary distro to the curb, and installed Gentoo, and every time someone now mentions how I spend 'so much time compiling' I remember what happened last time I was tempted to not use Gentoo.
I don't spend time compiling, my machines do. With portage at the helm there is very little interaction from me really. The time I spend keeping portage happy is a drop in the ocean compared to reinstalling every 6 months or so to keep up to date with the latest and greatest software, and if I ever decide I don't have the time anymore, I'll just stop doing 'emerge -uDNav world' until I do have time.

I'm writing this on the same amd64 install that I mentioned at the top of the thread, and save any catastrophic hardware failures can say with (smug/false/now worried) confidence it will be the last install I make on this machine.

I think Gentoo is wonderful, using it has taught me a great deal, the community is great (tho I think I'd still use it even if you were a bunch of....) and is one of it's greatest assets, portage- well, I can't really do it justice, but you all know how good it is.

All in all, Gentoo rocks, but I'll let you formulate your own opinion, it just means if you disagree with me on this, I am clearly right, and you are clearly wrong.

steveL · Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 5:02 am Post subject:

All the above :wink:

+

- it keeps my command line skills up to date

- I like coding on it- this is Linux in general, but I like automatically having source available, so if I want to tweak something I can. Having all the features for every package (eg KDE SuperUser console) is cool, although I think certain packages should be split into client and server, eg Samba.

kirillrdy · Posted: Sun Sep 24, 2006 10:18 pm Post subject:

I use Gentoo, simply because nothing else suits me,
Of course I sometimes get sick of spending too much time on maintaining it,
But, what I get in return is way better than what other distros offer.

I like my system being fully Unicode (not all distros realise that its a MUST have thing )
I like my system being totally uptodate (some distros believe that "stable" is better

(my hardmasked software works no worse than stable) )
and I LOVE my system, because ITS MY, in almost any aspect of it

Long live Gentoo
_________________
/-Everything is made from a dream-/ --Sakurai Kazutoshi