Should i switch back to gentoo?

Russel-Athletic · n00b Joined: 07 Jan 2005 Posts: 47

I used Gentoo for half a year in my old home in the time i go to school. I really liked it, but now i switched to Kubuntu.

But for some days i have the feeling: Something is not right

So i get exited about switching back to Gentoo in the future.
But i have some problems:
1. I only have a 10 GB Limit per month. I know sourcepackages are much larger and i want to download some other stuff. Perhaps some guys could mention how many traffic they have round about for updating their Gentoo ( i am a bit the type of guy who wants everything now up to date).
2. How much time do you need for updating. Because i don't have much time now as a student and i don't want to run my PC every day.
3. Their are some things i really like about Kubuntu, for example the easy mounting of USB Harddisks and so on. It is easy to configure in Gentoo?

Some things i should consider for or against switching back to Gentoo? Please mention it in your post.

luisfelipe · Guru Joined: 09 Apr 2005 Posts: 377

1) A full emerge -e world on my machine (and I got alot of packages installed , plus both kde and gnome) downloads about 2 gb
of stuff. But since you would only be downloading this once, and then downloading just a few mbs now and then, I guess you
should be ok with the bandwidth.
2) The amount of time it takes to administer the machine depends on you. If you like to mess around alot, then you're going to
waste alot of time.
3) On both KDE and GNOME I had usb stuff automagically mounting. It's quite easy to do it on their latest versions, not much config
needed.

SnakeByte · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 8:21 pm Post subject:

Hi there,

some of your problems can be solved ( more or less ) easily:

The portage tree update process already uses rsync to reduce network traffic,
this could be even more reduced by just downloading a complete snapshot tarball ( google for webrsync ).

For downloading new source packages search the gentoo forum for "deltup"
a utility that only downloads the deltas between your local versions and the requested files.

As a rule of thumb if you have no time to have your computer running
there is no need for having the newest versions of everything.
Just get the security announcements newletter and update the affected stuff.

Can not say anything about the USB hotplug/automout configuration.

regards

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2006 9:04 pm Post subject:

Russel-Athletic,

10Gb will be plenty if you limit your updates to once a month or less.
Thats plenty for security. On the oddoccaions when you need a bug fix or improved functionality, just update the packages you need.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.