Can you convince me that Gentoo is going forward?

[gossoon]

Hi All

Firstly please don't see this post as a rant or an invitation to start berating me. I have a serious question. Please bear with me.

I have been using Linux since around 1998, i was tasked with setting up a DNS server for the company i worked for. In those days DNS needed about a bajillion configuration files to work properly, and it took about a week to setup , the sense of achievement was awesome. I was hooked on Linux.

I moved to Linux 90% of the time at work, setup print servers and samba shares, people saw the advantage of linux, vmware was new then, but i could run NT4 and Win98 in a virtual machine. people were in awe. (i never thought vmware would turn into the huge success it has).

In about 2000/2001 i landed a job as an AIX admin, purely because the UNIX guys didn't know linux and needed help with a new fangled RedHat server. I joined the team and worked on the commandline for 3 years. I became proficient in shell scripting, mainly ksh and moved to perl quite quickly (much to the disgust of the hard core UNIX admins).

I had always had a linux box at home but wanted a more streamlined, faster more productive box. I was running Suse if i remember correrectly. I found Gentoo.

I tested 2004 edition on a spare box, pentium 166, i went for a stage 1 install. I think it took 2-3 days before i got into a fully working system. It was awesome.

I used Gentoo for around 3 years, until the brown nightmare they refer to as Ubuntu arrived. I must admit Ubuntu is good, very heavy but good. I have 2 friends who i have installed it for. 1 is a music teacher, the other is a college student.

I moved back down from Ubuntu to Debian - much faster, very stable, goot features. a little tempremental at times with configuration but generally faster by a long shot than Ubuntu.

My question, with the fragmentation that i saw in the past, can i come back to Gentoo now and feel comfortable with what i install. Or is Gentoo now a shadow of what it used to be.

Oh and if you read all that thank's, i needed to get it all out

Regards

Gossoon

[richard.scott]

Hi,

I've been using Gentoo since 2003. I have it on as many servers at work that I can and I think its far better than all the other distributions out there for your ability to totally customise it. Also, there are 1000's of packages in Portage and if its not there, you have the Layman overlay system to provide even more packages or you can easily write your own ebuild.

For me I use Gentoo as a Server OS rather than a Desktop OS. I have to integrate with many different types of systems and software at work so a Windows Desktop is more compatible and well, just easier. I may one day migrate over to a Linux Desktop and think "Why didn't I do this sooner!" but I haven't the need for it yet. So I guess it all comes down to what you need, what you like and what your comfortable with.

The one thing I like about Gentoo is its autobuild service. This service helps to keep the install images up to date and this is a great asset to our distribution. We don't need to do a release every few months and think up funky names for it like other distributions as our install media is always the latest that can be created.

If you want to get your hands dirty and really understand what makes a Linux system work then get back into using Gentoo. If you don't want to get your hands dirty and you want a Windows like Linux world thats nice and easy and already created for you then go for Ubuntu.

Bottom line is that Gentoo is great... Yes it went through a rocky patch, but it seems to be mostly over that now.

Rich

[gossoon]

Hi Rich

Thanks for the honest and sensible reply.

I have never had a problem with 'down and dirty' and love bespoke configuration (hence my original love of Gentoo), my worry was over the general problems i had around 2007ish. I seem to remember some of the main devs going elsewhere and various things were breaking in my Gentoo boxes. (although fixable i felt Gentoo itself was falling apart too)

I will start installing within the hour, just doing a backup...... will post back my impression of 2010 Gentoo

Gossoon

[Letharion]

If I wanted purely a desktop system for surfing, and writing the occasional document, I'd go with Ubuntu, which is also what I installed for my gf.

But because I to like the 'down and dirty' parts of linux, I think Gentoo is great. For running servers, I love it. The gentoo team does a great job with security http://labs.mwrinfosecurity.com/notices/security_mechanisms_in_linux_environment__part_1___userspace_memory_protection/ and servers get sensible defaults.
The default settings in the ubuntu terminal also frustrate me to no end, which no colors what so ever one dimension is missing in the information, and I can't (don't know how?) to use the semi-intelligent "page-up" search in Ubuntu.

Portage also slowly gets increasingly intelligent in its behaviour, which eases maintenance.

[richard.scott]

[Jimini]

I am using Gentoo for about 4 years now. It was the first linux distribution that really fascinated me, although it was frustrating from time to time, but the experience to build your own, customized system compensated that by far. I started with Gentoo on my router, which grow to a http- / ftp- and irc-server. By the time, my other systems changed from WinXP to Gentoo.
I don't use Gentoo (or Linux in general) in a job-related way (aside from a Debian-VM), but during the last years, I gained experience in administrating linux on several clients and servers at home.
Fortunately, Portage has become more and more intelligent - as already said. I have tried many other distributions yet (Debian, *buntu, Slackware, Arch, Mandriva, SuSe), but the way these distributions handled the installation of software annoyed me. It was too unflexible and too stupid, so after a short time, I gave up using these distributions. And of course, I always wanted a system which contains only the software that I really need. The flexibility and the possibility to customize my system to my own needs, that are the big advantages of Gentoo to me.

Some months ago, I installed Kubuntu on my girlfriends' notebook and assisted her while she made her first steps. She came from windows, so it was an improvement for me, no question ;)
But after a few weeks I noticed the limitations of apt; then, two weeks ago, I installed Gentoo on her desktop - until now, it works fine.
I guess that for me, there is no alternative to Gentoo anymore, I have found "my" operating system.

Best regards,
Jimini
_________________
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." (H.P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu)

[Letharion]

One thing that Gentoo/portage does really well that I don't like at all in Ubuntu, is how the packages are named.
Because of the use-flags, mysql is called, mysql.
Amarok is called, amarok.
In ubuntu, whenever you search for anything, you get so many options even I get confused about which to install.
I'm really hoping Kuroo will show up soon (and be kick ass good), so people not quite so comfortable with a CLI can use Gentoo better.

Not really a new thing, Gentoo has worked like that for as long as I've used it, but still

[jonnevers]

[Raptor85]

Portage is a godsend and getting better all the time.

For the past few years I've been moving to a pure Gentoo setup, all my servers desktops and everything run gentoo now. (including my ps3, my Raq2, and a few other odd machines ). Couldn't imagine using any other system at this point.

[Chiitoo]

While I have hardly the experience of Linux to speak of (tried Ubuntu briefly some year(s) ago), ny experiences with Gentoo have been more than surprising, positive and exciting even!

I do not actually remember how I ended up finding out about Gentoo in the first place. Probably more or less randomly via a general Linux website or something, but either way, my first experiences were from trying it out on an older box, and it was really fun even with all the difficulties I had. Now, for some weeks, I've been using it full-time for my main desktop where I do everything I do (gaming, reading, conversing, programming, everything except video editing I have not yet looked into). I partly decided to try Gentoo on the main-computer due to weird sluggishness under xP especially during multi-tasking (several applications running) after I got some new hardware including a 6-core AMD CPU. So I tried win7 but I kept getting bluescreen a lot pretty randomly. Gentoo has yet to crash in any way though one time the computer had restarted for some reason, I still don't know why (I do have a suspicion towards my PSU which is, or was brand new as well)...

In the beginning, I think the most fun came from the fact how you build it, reminds me of my early computer times with a Commodore 64 and the first PC with some M$DOS diskettes... This time around it was a "bit" more "high-tech" though.

I've been very positively suprised about how I keep getting things to work, and how easy it has been and becomes even more easy as I learn new things. I did have a bit of a guard against Linux because I had no experience of UNIX etc. at all so it was pretty much completely new. But as I said, things are working nicely, even games, not running as well as under windoze sure, but well enough, and it feels great to not be so tied-in-to using a certain OS.


In short, I like Linux, specifically Gentoo more and more so that gotta mean something!
Could well be THE ONE for me. ^^

And as a conclusion, gotta mention the community here and amongst Linux in general. It makes me like it a great deal more!
_________________
Kindest of regardses.

[regomodo]

For me I think Gentoo hasn't really gone anywhere in the 4years i've used it. That's not a bad thing. The state of the tree has fluctuated over time but there's one thing I'm noticing; the state of the documentation. They used to be bombproof but now I see a half-finished or outdated page every so often. For example:

lvm2 There's nothing about Grub, let alone Grub2.

Gentoo isn't the whizz-bang features of other Distro's, it's the configurability of portage in Gentoo's documentation. For me, it's the latter that is slipping.

[asturm]

[regomodo]

[asturm]

You didn't find this?

[regomodo]

[Etal]

Grub2 isn't even keyworded for testing, why would you expect official documentation on it?

[asturm]

Exactly. There has never been documentation for masked packages. Wait until it's actually there or do it yourself and share your experience so someone can build up on it. There actually once was discussion on grub2 in fgo/Unsupported Software, finding that shouldn't be a miracle.

[regomodo]

[asturm]

Well that is interesting, and surely then they should be able to answer your questions.

As long as the grub2 hompage says this, I'm not so sure it is going to be stabilized in Gentoo:

[Ormaaj]

Basically the ultimate argument against any sort of "Gentoo is dead" FUD is the fact that Gentoo is currently the only thing out there that does anything close to what Gentoo does (source based and rolling release meta-distro). So long as the need for such a distro doesn't go away neither will support and development. Maybe someday Exherbo will take over but I'm not holding my breath.

[slonocode]

[AllenJB]

[slonocode]

[AllenJB]

[NeddySeagoon]