just a simple "why"

[TwYst]

let me start by sayin hi and that i actually love the gentoo distro no matter how the rest of my post is going to sound.
first off i will give ya a lil background.. in the past 5 years i have tried alot of different distrobutions . i have settled on 2 . one of them being gentoo , but i have a few questions i can never seem to find adequate answers for.
why is it possible that with other unnamed distros i can load the full system in an hour and right off the bat they can detect i have an nvidia card and ask me if i want to install the proprietary driver for it so i can enable 3d effects and such while when i use gentoo on the exact same machine its a 52 step process just to get the screen resolution set properly much less the added 22 steps to load the nvidia drivers just to have emerge error and tell me its missing this and that .so i spend 2 days chasing all the missing dependencies down only to have gentoo tell me 3d is not possible on the same box that had beryl with full 3d running on it less than a week previously under a different distro.
funny enough one of the distros i have tried in the past was sabayon which i understand is gentoo based but works perfectly right out of the box. only reason i removed that one was my preference for gnome over kde.
although its only an opinion i think both installers for gentoo are horrible. for people like myself i could care less what my monitors refresh rate is. i dont want to have to do research to find out weather i should enable eth0 or eth1 for internet access. i want to simply install a well made distro and have things work the way they should.my system is kind of bog standard..nothing extravagant and yet even the basic things need to be set up by hand. default resolution defaults to 800x600 after installation. after tweaking and setting up the x server i can finally get it to display 1152x864 or any of the more usable resolutions. but why isnt this stuff set up from the start?
when you buy or build a computer you do so so that you can either be productive on it or play games on it, either way if we are spending all our time setting up x servers or sorting out 3d acceleration problems or any number of the other little things gentoo has the end user do instead of using a set of safe defaults that can be changed if needed to accomodate the few who the base settings wouldnt work for.
i understand gentoo has come a long way in the past year 2 years but some issues like this are enough to make some people decide gentoo is behind the times. while other distros are spending time to make sure things are easier for the end user to install and use thier distros, gentoo seems content to take the long way around when it comes to getting a working productive system going. and even longer way around when you want to add any of the current eye candy to it.
i still wont dump gentoo but i will be stuck shaking my head any time i need to install it because in this day and age of all the quality distros.. things should be easy

[GatoVolador]

A simple answer: an easy completely automated install is not one of the goals of Gentoo. Rather Gentoo aims at giving complete control (responsibility) to the user. This is inherently at odds with a completely automated installation we might find in other distros.

I must say that I do agree with you about the frustration of trying to, say, install ATI or Nvidia drivers. I have felt this frustration. Right now, ati-drivers seems to be broken as I cannot successfully compile it. However, I value the control enough to deal with the occasional snafus.

In my case, I've got a working KDE system that lets me do everything I need to (which is mostly development). It took me a while to set up, but it is noticeably more responsive than the openSUSE KDE I have installed on another faster machine. Of course I could build openSUSE up from the base install, but that is not it's goal so support for doing such a thing is limited. Of course, on Gentoo, this custom building is the goal and so the support is much better.

Anyway, I've rambled enough.

[desultory]

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Gentoo Chat.

[TwYst]

i understand about the control goal in gentoo itself but would it be so hard to integrate the same control in a gui based installer... for example a tick box for minimal install with an additional tick box for installing proprietary drivers for those of us with nvidia or ati cards. then a different tick box if you prefer an advanced install where you could have the choice of how deep you want to configure your own system. things like the xserver and such should really detect and set up automatically aside from the little tweaking they may need to fine tune things

[gerard27]

There are probably hundreds of distro's.
The majority have gui installers.
Stick with those.Gentoo can (and I hope) will not change it's install system.
Have you ever heard of "rpm hell"?
Try installing an rpm from distro 1 on distro 2 and you'll see what I mean.
And try upgrading one of the easily installed distro's.
And of course if you want everything to work right out of the box there is MSWindows.
Gerard.

[PaulBredbury]

[TwYst]

[ok]

[Phenax]

Yep, Gentoo is what it is. There are people (me included) that like this way. If you want a distro that does a ton of auto-detection and whatnots the majority do that.

[TwYst]

[Phenax]

[nativemad]

[TwYst]

ty for the links. i am sure they will be helpful but as for emerge nvidia-drivers on 4 different installs 2 different computers 2 different nvidia cards both linux compatible..it has yet to work without either missing dependancies or basic errors that take hours to sort out.

[tld]

[Cyker]

Gentoo really is bad for people that just want to install and go.

Making a simplified installer would be redundant - Ubuntu has pretty much cornered the market in that regard, and really is a much better distro if you just want to get things going as quickly as possible.
If Linux ever becomes mainstream, it will be because of distros built like Ubuntu.

Gentoo isn't like Ubuntu. While distros like Ubuntu cater to the mainline, the consumer, Gentoo caters to the hacker*. Gentoo requires learning, understanding. You have to spend the time to read and learn and think to get it to work, and it will reward you for it.

If one can't give it that time, then it will not be a good distro for that one.

However, there is nothing stopping someone from improving the current installer - That is what the GPL and open source in general is about after all. But it won't be easy - Who will put the time in?
I am a lazy person so I try not to ask too much of others - After all, if I ain't gonna do it, what right do I have to ask of others to do it?


* And I mean the NHD/Jargon/FOLDOC 'real' definition here

[nativemad]

[Monkeh]

[TwYst]

just last night i decided i was going to start over to see if maybe it was a fluke that nvidia drivers woudlnt load. i did a fresh install of gentoo 2007 only 2 things i chose during installation to be added was gnome and X11. that portion done i now had a linux systen with a screen default at 800x600 so i do the xorg -configure set everything up the way it should be. reboot my pc and its black screen with an error, cannot find module "nvidia" ok so i use the command line and copy my origional backup of the config file and reboot. then open a terminal type emerge nvidia-drivers and sit back n wait..2 minuted later i get the error from the installer that it cant find a usable symlink in /etc/usr/linux (why not?shouldnt this be there by default to begin with) ok so i do some more research and find out how to make a symlink.. get that part sorted and emerge nvidia-drivers again
this time install completes as it should so i open my xorg.config file and change where default was set to "nv" drivers to "nvidia" and reboot. low and behold it gives me an error that there is a missing module or something. the saga continues as this was getting late and i work early so i had to give up for the evening. but as it sits now on my other box i have a gentoo system that is less than 12 hrs old and cant do something as simple as load a set of proprietary drivers without becoming unusable or litterally taking hours to sort the issues that should never be there to begin with because it was a brand new fresh install. the fun bits gonna be after i finally get the nvidia drivers to load.. watch and see the errors i end up with when i type "emerge beryl" lol

[John R. Graham]

In the movie Say Anything starring John Cusack and Ione Skye, there's a scene where he's teaching her to drive a car with a manual transmission. Needless to say, there's a lot of grinding heard. At one point she asks, "Is that normal?" The answer: "Well, no, it's not normal, but as you continue, you hear less of it."

Gentoo is (I've come to understand) intentionally tuned for the expert. Why? The experts like it that way for much the same reason that some people prefer manual transmissions. The reasons you encounter such "grinding" may not be obvious to you at your stage of learning. But the reassurance I can give you is that, if you continue, you'll see less of it.

- John

[TwYst]

i appreciate the fact that it is a learning experience . but when something that should be relatively painless turns into the drama i encounter time and time again all i can ask is "why?" which was my initial reason for this post to begin with.

[PaulBredbury]

Hah, "relatively painless" exists in the parallel world where Claudia Schiffer is in my bedroom. With my current PC, it took about 3 months of tinkering with the multitude of bugs in the motherboard's BIOS to get it stable. On top of years of tinkering and self-education to get a free OS running smoothly, and with most of the software that I want.

As a (useless but hopefully humorous) analogy, a "relatively painless" car would be a £10 sports car that comes with a lifetime (mine, not the car's) guarantee that it will need no further maintenance, liquids, tyres, bulbs, air fresheners or other inconvenience. And that has the option of driving itself to the destination of my choice, if I'm tired or drunk or have other uses for my hands.

Back on-topic, all of these questions have been asked and answered dozens of times in extremely similar threads to this one. Here's some random truisms:

The Gentoo devs don't have the time or motivation to make things easy for newbies.

When things break in Gentoo, the user is supposed to have sufficient expertise to be able to fix it - otherwise, that user should not be using Gentoo. Why go through the pain. After all, this is the reason that the distro doesn't fill itself with "helpful" scripts - it keeps out of the user's way. Of course, this isn't perfect, yes we already know that.

Just thought of another car analogy: A millionaire kid passes his driving test on the 16th birthday, then buys a 5.7-litre muscle car monster (which is a few years old, and so doesn't have such baby features as traction control), after learning in a 1-litre-engined car. And then wraps it around a lamp post on the same day. He moans, "I just put my foot hard on the accelerator, like I always do, and the back-end went sideways!" Do we blame the kid, or the car (leaving the parents out of it)?

One day, when I've got nothing better to do, I'll compile a list of the many "Why isn't Gentoo exactly like Ubuntu?" threads. They often have recurring characters, although the names change - here's a politically-incorrect list:

The "Whinger". He started the thread, and wants the moon on a stick. Inevitably, will be disappointed. May bash head on desk, or sigh audibly, as frustration mounts. Expects that unpaid geeks will treat all questions with courtesy and respect. Has done no prior research.

The Linux/Gentoo "Fanboy" who believes that Gentoo is "perfect" as it is, and absolutely nothing could possibly make it better. Enjoys pain and suffering, especially that of others.

The "Superman" who has never had a single problem with Gentoo, despite running it with uber-l33tness on a million servers worldwide. Cannot comprehend of all the problems that other, little, people have. Has been using Linux (wirelessly) since inside the womb.

The "Windows basher" who couldn't care less what the topic is about. Has an urge, nay a never-ending need, to repeatedly state to anyone who will listen that, no matter how bad things are in Linux, they were much worse under Windoze. Tends to shut up only when asked where all the games are, muttering something about wine.

The "Spoilsport" has no job or a boring job, and hence nothing better to do than respond to these threads, just to point out that all the questions are boring and have been answered in lots of other threads. Does not provide any links to said threads. Is cursed with a keen awareness of the differences of opinion expressed in the thread, and the disappointment that no-one listens to him anyway. Just like in the other threads.

Mr. Godwin, who is the only person who can possibly end an argument between such characters. Points out that they are all really of the same mind & opinion, when they've stated their viewpoints and considered those of the others: Girls tend to be bored to tears by this stuff.

I suppose I should end this with a

Edit: Half-hearted attempt to make this post funnier, or at least more neatly-formatted.

[TwYst]

heh considering i never mentioned ubuntu myself but others have in this thread , i dont use that distro personally because of its candy store approach. i chose debian and gentoo to run because i like minimal crap on my system . i only want to have the applications on my own computers that i chose to install.i would just like them to install a bit easier without the headaches involved sometimes..**bashing head on desk**

[John R. Graham]

[PaulBredbury]

[John R. Graham]

You see? That just proves that Gentoo is perfect! Are you sure you're not a fanboy?

- John