Why do you use Gentoo

Penguin of Wonder · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 1:30 am Post subject:

Here's the article if anyone else cares to read it and because I know someone will ask.

http://www.apcstart.com/site/amills/2006/09/1589/use-the-source-luke
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timeBandit · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 4:22 am Post subject:

Because I can fix things when they misbehave. Which most often means: Portage and its supporting tools (gentoolkit et al.).

I run stable x86, and prefer to update in big chunks--only 2-3 times per year. When a big update goes south (which thankfully isn't too often), backing it out doesn't make an even bigger mess. The dependency management is nothing short of amazing.

Recent example: three weeks ago, I applied six months' worth of accumulated package updates, largely without difficulty. That impressed me right there, but...within a day, I found problems in Gnome that smelled of work-in-progress upstream, and decided I (a) couldn't live with them and (b) would not burn a week's leisure time (or more!) on fixes and workarounds, if any.

So I rolled up my sleeves, spent a bit under two hours carefully identifying the upgraded bits and their dependencies, masked about fifty packages, ran one emerge...and downgraded all of Gnome perfectly, in one go. (Except for yelp, where I'd missed one dependency.)

The key was the tools (portage, etc.) let me eliminate almost all uncertainty in the rollback. It was possible to trace dependencies with accuracy and confidence, to get a good result in one shot. That kind of solid maintainability is what keeps me around, and is why I feel I can postpone updates for months on end. I can wait until I have time, and I have options when there are problems.

Nice.
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renrutal · Posted: Mon Sep 25, 2006 6:57 am Post subject:

Penguin of Wonder · Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 3:38 pm Post subject:

I personally didn't agree with him because I felt like he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. One paragraph he love Gentoo because of its configurablity, the way it allows the user to choose. Then rakes in the next because he has to edit his own config files. I would consider editing my own config files another form of choice. Its another way to make it "mine." I'm sure being source based has its problems, like after upgrades, but binary have their own problems as well. I never go through any sort of dependency trouble with Gentoo, I was always fighting that in Slackware and Ubuntu.
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onlinepancakes · Posted: Sat Sep 30, 2006 11:36 pm Post subject:

It just works.
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PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

smf · n00b Joined: 03 Jan 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Netherlands

In short --- already doing to much, to late, to detailled ,no money

1) Control freak.

2) want to know in detaill why and how.

3) dont like to do more than needed.

4) ultimatly like (want to?) have working "stuff" without having to worry (http://www.realtime.net/~wdoud/topics/worry.html) to much about it afterwards (if is does work, yes o no ) no windows vodoo shit please, its already dificult enough to make it work and keep it working around the clock.

5) Do not like stuff i cannot explain.

6) already with linux / unix as of 1994 full time, Hope mi inglish is not to far off to make myself understood, already drunk because want to forget mi frustrations of the day. Dont want to spend any more time right now to explain my motivation.

7) In short, love gentoo.

Resolves (my) problems instead of making more of theme. Still dont have any money right know. will let you know when i can contribute (in any form usefull) to the community. Hopefully y0u or anybody else will notice.

9) love, peace, a better world to all off us.

OtonVM · Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 3:23 pm Post subject:

(1) Control over the setup process;
I love the handbook and/or other guides to install gentoo (emission for example) and I really don't get people who say the setup is too complicated... exept maybe the kernel config, where you really need to know your hardware, but otherwise very clear and easy. Gentoo was my first distro I installed as a complete noob and didn't have any problems.

(2) Community and docs;
Both very helpfull and professional.

(3) Portage;
I tried Ubuntu in vmware and I hated the apt way of handling packages. A complete mess. Maybe it was just me or maybe not, but emerge gives me the feeling of power over my system I learned to expect form linux, otherwise I would have stayed with win (even if beryl would call me back soon

)

(4) Sources;
yes, everything has to be build from source wich is great. Not becouse everything is faster and more optimized (let's face it, there is no such huuuge difference) but becouse all (almost all) linux software is distributed as source in the first place so I'm not forced to stick with repositories (another thing I hated in Ubuntu and suse), but I can either manually build or create an ebuild for local use only from a template. And another thing in connection with building from source is the (obvius) presence of gcc wich should in my opinion be an essential tool in linux so you can build your own kernel and other packages. That's the point of linux after all. Open source, right?

AelMalinka · n00b Joined: 27 Sep 2006 Posts: 2 Location: United States

Reasons:

Works
Configurable
Open

i tried using gnetoo before and it crashed my system (laptop using gtk installer)
i tried again manually (desktop) worked after i ironed out the details

but in doing so my harddrives crashed and needed to be reformated

so i stuck to gentoo and ditched my SLED isntall

rawfuzz · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2006 Posts: 13 Location: USA

1. Friendly (most of it anyway) & kinda big community. BTW, party at my place when we hit 100k forum members =))
2. Documentation (kinda hard to beat & it goes hand in hand with the community)
3. Learning Curve (pretty self explanatory, isn't it?)
4. Flexibility & Stability (stop doing dumb stuff and you'll get a stable, fast system)
5. Portage's Features (eg. USE Flags)

All in all, those are the main reasons I chose the Gentoo distribution and those are the main reasons that are keeping it on my HDD. The fact that the distro is source-based means a lot but I'd probably survive on a binary distro like Slackware. The fact that the distro is "omg optimized" for my specs doesn't really mean that much to me, despite the fact that it did make a couple of stuff run much faster than a "i686 optimized" binary distribution would.

stuart111 · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

After using many linux distros (slackware, suse, fedora, mandrake), some thomas dude twisted my arm to try gentoo!
It was initially very different to anything else i had used.

A few things have made me stay with gentoo for some two years now, and keep me interested.

1.) ITS FAST!
2.) no bloatware! - only what you need
3.) ITS FAST!
4.) stable
5.) PORTAGE ROCKS!
6.) no more dependancy stuffups!

Thats just a few, but its a really great distro - way ahead of its competitors.

rawfuzz · n00b Joined: 02 Oct 2006 Posts: 13 Location: USA

SimonZarate · Posted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 7:35 pm Post subject:

#emerge world

My reason!
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stuart111 · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

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

stuart111 · n00b Joined: 17 Sep 2006 Posts: 12

yeah, im not sold on that...

nothing beats emerge

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

pheonix991 · n00b Joined: 30 Sep 2006 Posts: 11

Emerge, and ubuntu wouldn't work. NOW I CAN'T START MY GENTOO!!!

*figures out how to recompile kernel on first install of gentoo ever*

thestick · Guru Joined: 07 Apr 2006 Posts: 531 Location: /dev/urandom

1. Gentoo Linux
2. Windows XP
3. other crappy linux distros
i think that after gentoo , i would use windows xp .. i mean it, it`s the only thing that made me do the switch.
i now use only gentoo on everything i touch.

defenderBG · l33t Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 817

i use it because of emerge, the great art

because i am a noob and want to learn more about linux, and there is no better way than gentoo.

not to forget, there is no better 64bit distro for amd64!

Juha_K · n00b Joined: 29 Feb 2004 Posts: 18 Location: Finland

I got maybe a "bit" strange reason for Gentoo. I use it because fonts are most beutifull on this distro. I recently tried Suse and Ubuntu but with both I failed to get nice antialised fonts for X :lol:

I Even tried to use same config-files from Gentoo, it just didn't look as nice as with Gentoo. Strange, eh?

Well, bonus for Gentoo is also speed, documentation and kind of "geeky" feeling, but I can live without those, I just need those nice antialised fonts, without my eyes are burning!

(like I said, a "bit" strange reason)

Kaste · Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2006 10:29 pm Post subject:

Fun,fast,solid,secure, great tutorials and community (Set's it apart from the other distros) and on top of that EYE Candy... E17 and beryl beat almost everything hands down(makes the difference to Mac OS X, Windows Vista etc...) I even got my girlfriend to like it

My Mother's next HarrHarr!

Did anyone try looking glas yet? I'd love to see how it compares to beryl.

Corona688 · Veteran Joined: 10 Jan 2004 Posts: 1204

Because it installs the $#!@ing headers. No more "why doesn't this compile, I have xyz... oh, I need xyz-DEVEL" or "why doesn't my system have gcc??"

That and I can dick around with it without breaking it. Mandrake never forgave me for switching to a newer kernel. Gentoo couldn't care less.

The from-source thing has more uses than the obvious. Gentoo's almost a distro-building kit. Set things up, then make your own trees, and maintain bits here and there when needed...
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WizMaster · n00b Joined: 08 Apr 2006 Posts: 19

- The high degree of customization
- The great community
- The great documentation
- Portage (and the ability to add my own custom packages to portage