Death of Gentoo

RAPUL · Posted: Sun Jan 04, 2004 8:03 pm Post subject: It will ve much better...

It will be much better many other distros uses portage-ng because this will boost portage development, and therefore gentoo development.

Many users will try portage outside gentoo and maybe migrate to gentoo to make the most profit of portage.

And also i like this previous said sentence:

sneakerski · Apprentice Joined: 14 Oct 2003 Posts: 168

in my opinion, portage is a powerful tool, but not the main reason i use gentoo. gentoo also provides a great amount of control to me over my system, including limiting bloat, customizing the boot process, setting optimizations, and which graphical features i want.

the community is something you won't find anywhere else, atleast that i know of. it's full of knowledge, holds your hand when you need it and you help others when you can. and generally, the attitude about it is extremely high. as mentioned, there is very little of the "search for yourself" or "RTFM" philosiphy.

gentoo also approaches the 'moving to linux from windows or mac' ideal in a very different way from something more like RH or MDK. I used both before gentoo simply because i'd heard of them and not gentoo at the time. I could install them, assuming it automatically detected all my devices. And i could usually follow their GUI configuration programs. But the second i hit a wall or there was a bug in the GUI, i was completely stuck. i realized i knew just about nothing about linux.
gentoo on the other hand teaches you many important tools and a lot about the interal workings of linux. the documentation is far superiour to anything RH or MDK or slackware or windows ever offered me (i've no experience with macOS). now, when i have a problem, i know what to do, and how to correct it (i must admit, i've had far fewer problems because i knew what i was doing and the install was for my machine, not 100,000 generic people's computers). only gentoo could have offered me that.

a friend of mine installed the current portage over slack 8. he did so mainly to keep a few packages up to date. and it works flawlessly. but as i keep talking to him about gentoo as a whole, he's moving away from slackware and towards gentoo.

gentoo has many unique qualities to it, and even as you move some of these to other distros (aka portage-ng), it's really introducing people to some of what gentoo can offer. advertising campaign? i wouldn't go that far. but it surely raises awareness to gentoo and many of the benefits it offers over other distrobutions.

as far as i can see, gentoo is here to stay for a while, and the spreading of portage to others will only extend the life of gentoo

regeya · Posted: Mon Jan 05, 2004 6:33 pm Post subject:

I have trouble seeing Gentoo as a dying system mainly because Gentoo is moving in new directions. What makes a system like, say, Debian dead to my eyes is that its userbase doesn't want to change at all. apt needs no changes as it's perfect, the release system needs no change ever because it's perfect, etc. It's a terrible attitude and few have it in Gentoo.

The only thing that could kill Gentoo IMHO is if the userbase/development base suddenly stops caring, or degenerates into pre-adolescent screaming matches. I see that once in a while; you'll occasionally see someone accuse someone else of being a moron, or when someone's critical of anything Gentoo-centric once in a while someone else will pop up and tell the critical party to go off and fix it themselves. That's rare, fortunately, and I hope it stays that way. The last thing Gentoo needs is a bunch of testosterone-inflated egos running around telling others to just go fix problems themselves because they're not problems at all; once that happens, Gentoo's lost one of the things that makes it unique.

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

PseudoKrazy · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 2:52 am Post subject:

I doubt that Gentoo would slowly die off because of Portage being cross-compatible in such a way. Take redhat's rpm for example. Multiple Distributions use it, and I have yet to see Redhat fade away because of that. If anything it will popularize the distribution. Besides, didnt gentoo barrow the idea of portage from *BSD? *BSD still seems to be doing fine...

NewBlackDak · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 6:01 am Post subject:

zebbedi · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 05 Sep 2003 Posts: 123

Well i hope if other distros start using portage then theyre also going to start adding their own rsync servers, because as it is at the moment were all being told not to sync too often. If they all come flooding in and dont add servers... will that affect anything?

shash · Apprentice Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 220 Location: India

It's not just dropping portage onto another distro: Imagine RedHat with portage installed - chaos!

Gentoo, on the other hand, was designed to use portage from the ground up (or rather, the other way round), and thus, uses portage most effectively. Portage-ng may be nice, and I admit, I'll probably use it on some of my friends' systems (guys not geared to run a from-source, do it yourself distro, just newbs) to give them a taste of different flavours of Linux, but not for myself. I personally prefer installing rpm and dpkg on gentoo, and using those instead.

i_hate_your_os · Posted: Thu Jan 08, 2004 5:26 am Post subject:

Some arbitrary distro with portage installed (and used in preference to up2date or whatever) would slowly morph into a gentoo box... So don't look at it as "loosing Gentoo boxen to Red Hat boxen" but as "usurping Red Hat boxen and gradually morphing them into Gentoo boxen" :twisted:

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darkcoder · Posted: Fri Sep 10, 2004 6:43 am Post subject:

Filan · n00b Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 48

after trying to upgrade from QT2 to QT3 via RPM once while using redhat and getting nothing but errors, i downloaded the source from trolltech and from then on ive had a thing against RPMs. portage seems to allways know what i need when i emerge a package i want. if someone gave portage a nifty GUI and called it "Gentoo Update" i bet newer users would catch on even faster. hmm wish i could program that it would be nifty to see a Gui'd portage(with the ability to kick over to console at any time of course) would be kinda cool for use inder X though.

darkcoder · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 7:56 pm Post subject:

All rpm distros (and debian ones AFAIK) suffer the same problem. When you get outside your main repository in search for custimized programs, then the dependency hell begins, which in some cases, prevents you from an easy upgrade path, ie. Ximian Desktop on RH, Suse, or PLF/Textar ebuilds for MDK, or mixing stable/unstable branches of Debian.
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spb · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:03 pm Post subject:

darkcoder · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:05 pm Post subject:

Every package management has its virtues and defects. For example, dunno that companies will end up using portage since it remove the concept of "For new features, get the new version for $$$ money". But, for the admin point of view, a system that allows you to update without taking the system offline like apt-get, freebsd ports, emerge, pacman, or urpmi (when it wants to work :lol:

) are priceless.

One time I look at Linspire, and while not give it a long test, IMHO it looks to me they disable system update (for example, new kernels etc) so a $$ update for new technology is needed.
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darkcoder · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:07 pm Post subject:

and disable system update I means that while CNR update your computer, it not gives you latest kernel (even 2.4 branch), for example, or xorg. Just updated apps.
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darkcoder · Posted: Sat Sep 11, 2004 8:17 pm Post subject:

Also I do not think Gentoo will die because:

Which other distro allow you to install OpenOffice with either gtk (gnome look) or kde look? Others only allow one of them.
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Not bleeding edge.... No pain no game :twisted:

Filan · n00b Joined: 10 Sep 2003 Posts: 48

hmm as systems get faster.... i wonder how fast gentoo would bootstrap on a 4way Optron with a few gigs of ram....... i bet you could have a fully fuctional with xorg+(your favorite wm here) system in a day on a rig like that lol.

avenj · Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 7:51 am Post subject:

spb · Posted: Sun Sep 12, 2004 12:21 pm Post subject:

Drewgrange · Guru Joined: 29 Mar 2003 Posts: 483 Location: Ohio, US

apt can be used in redhat, but Debian is still around.

Then again Debian has more than apt to go on.

yoshi314 · l33t Joined: 30 Dec 2004 Posts: 850 Location: PL

maybe someday all distros will switch to from-source installs, when computers get fast enough. but then again, compilators might get more sophisticated as well.

for instance, kde related packages compile very slow compared to standard C/C++ code, since they use extra Qt tools to work. there might be more tools like that in the future.
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Shadow Skill · Veteran Joined: 04 Dec 2004 Posts: 1023

I think we need to push portage cross platform capability forward not as a mere port to paste rather crappy rpm's on top of [there is no package management tool that can ever hope to deal with rpm based distros as the rpm format itself is shot period.] but instead to create a standardized installation mechanism for installing software across all *nix systems once we do that we will have solved one major problem preventing us from really kicking Microsoft's ass in the home desktop market. You of course have to couple portage with some sort of working binary format IE not rpm in any way shape or form.
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mantheorem · Posted: Sat Mar 26, 2005 4:38 pm Post subject:

I think this proves that gentoo is liked for more things than just portage:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-309257.html
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frameRATE · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 4:14 pm Post subject:

rush_ad · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 1:44 am Post subject:

got my system up and running withing a day (under 24 hours) with X and other utils. Most of kde too.

amd 64 2800+