"Are we losing users to Gentoo?"

Matje · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 8:09 pm Post subject:

I just switched too Gentoo because I was sick of Red Hat doing stuff to my config without me knowing and hogging my memory. I was looking for something new. I tried Debian once, months ago, when I didn't know much of linux, maybe that's why it didn't work, but I don't care. I couldn't even get a stupid X-server installed. Yet I still was looking for a system which would let me decide myself what I should install and preferably had something more up-to-date as i386 binaries, so I found Gentoo, and I'm sticking on it. I'm thinking of installing all the servers for a lanparty with it, but I'll have to discuss that with others :-)

chatgris · Guru Joined: 14 Oct 2002 Posts: 383 Location: Canada

The thing that brought me to gentoo was the hype i guess of compilation for your own system.

The thing that kept me here was that this forum is full of people who are ready and willing to help a newbie =). And I don't see myself leaving anytime soon.

Mnemia · Guru Joined: 17 May 2002 Posts: 476

Main reasons I came to Gentoo were that I wasn't happy with the technical merits of the RPM based distros and was put off by the elitist Debian attitude. I came just before 1.0 was released, so I was on the beginning of the big burst of newcomers. It had nothing at all to do with hype: the most I'd ever heard of Gentoo before trying it was a couple references to it when people I knew were talking about Sorceror. I read over the site carefully and decided it'd be interesting to at least give it a shot.

I particularly liked how Gentoo tried to make it easy for newcomers to jump right in. The forums didn't actually exist yet when I did my first install but the documentation was all I really needed. And a week or two later the forums were started up and answered all my nagging questions. This area was one that particularly put me off of Debian. I mean, you have to do a bunch of reading just to even understand how to start their convoluted installation process since they don't care to create nice easy ISOs like every other distro out there. I always laugh when I see Slashdot trolls claiming Gentoo has a bad install process when I compare it to Debian.

I actually messed with Debian and a couple Debian derivatives at work a couple years ago when we were looking at something to possibly replace or supplement Redhat, which we weren't completely happy with. Once I did try to use it for a while, I was annoyed by the level of petty politics and elitism in their community. I'd (almost) rather use Redhat than deal with that. Not that I'm dissing Debian in particular: many of the smartest people in the overall Linux community are there and Debian has always been at the forefront of the FSF point of view, which I have a lot of respect for. I *like* what Debian stands for, but I don't like to use it on a practical basis.

I think it's funny seeing how many of the people outside the Gentoo community have been talking about it lately. At first there was a really positive response. Now virtually all the really vocal people in other forums are very negative towards Gentoo. Some of this can be explained by simple ignorance: I think a lot of people look at the concept and scoff at it without actually trying it and seeing that it's not what they were expecting at all. Everyone focuses on the compilation time, but that's almost a non-issue for me once you have an install complete. I just run my updates niced in a spare virtual console and I don't even notice it. Far better situation than having to wait ages for the distro to come out with a new binary package. Others I think feel threatened by Gentoo because they perceive it as detracting from their own perch as the "cool" crowd in the Linux community.

Whatever, it doesn't really matter. The competition can only be good for all the distros because it keeps them all improving and sharing ideas with each other.

simulacrum · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 9:11 pm Post subject:

I would say the lack of thorough documentation is a contributing factor to my learning of linux. Because there was no manual detailing step by step what to do, I had to dig into things, learn how processes interact with eachother, etc. Searching around the net for scraps of information, other people's experiences and the like is what taught me how to use and troubleshoot linux.

I think I can relate to the feeling of "Why should I have to go through hell to get to this point of understanding just to tell you what you need to know?" In other words, RTFM. I'm not saying this is a good approach, but it worked for me.

Rajesh · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 14

I don't know why people say that Gentoo users are attracted to it by the hype.

I have been using a Redhat + Ximian based distro at home for nearly two years now (moving to Ximian from the pure RH distro I used prior to 2000) For a few months, I was pleased with Ximian's Red Carpet package updates. But soon felt its lack of updates. Mozilla wasn't updated on Ximian for ages. The RPM dependencies are indeed a nightmare.

For me, Gentoo's Portage system alone was enough reason to want to give it a try. And after a month of using Gentoo, I am completely hooked. The Portage system has the distinction of being both simple enough for new Linux users to effortlessly manage upgrades, while giving the power users enough control over exactly what gets installed (USE variables!) I also discovered the added bonus of noticeable improvements in speed on almost all apps I use frequently as they have all been compiled with the right optimizations for my PC.

One more appealing aspect of Gentoo is that it is one of the best distros for Linux users who love to play around with their system (very much like Slackware users.)

And last but not the least, the Gentoo user community support and comprehensive documentation is the best I have seen among all Linux distros.

And to top it all, Gentoo has managed to do all this in its relatively short life span what other distros haven't been able to do for ages. Long live Gentoo!

I have enough trust in Gentoo's stability that I am already planning to replace my RH web servers with Gentoo during the Xmas holidays!

I know that all of the above has been said before, but I just wanted to keep this thread going for a while

mooman · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 9:55 pm Post subject:

phong · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 10:04 pm Post subject:

There are a couple of misconceptions (or, they are misconceptions in my view) about Gentoo, that may be attracting users, but are probably harmful to the distro's image:

1) Gentoo is for anyone.

This is bogus. If you can't deal with the negative tradeoffs are for running a source based distro, or don't understand what they are, you shouldn't run one. Almost everyone I've heard complain on these forums and says they're leaving for some other disto has complaints indicating their personality, computer use patterns or whatever is incompatable with source based distros. That's fine, there are many good binary distros. Different strokes for different folks.

2) Optimizing for your computer is a huge benefit and the best reason to use Gentoo.

The performance improvement is measurable, maybe noticable, but certainly marginal. Way down on the list of Gentoo's advantages IMNSHO.

2a) You need a specific complicated set of CFLAGS to get the most out of your specific computer.

Most people won't notice a difference between their CFLAGS and -march=i686 -O2 most of the time. It would pass the Folgers Crystals test anyhow...

3) Gentoo is a small, lightweight distro that can run on little hardware.

True, the base install is fast and minimalist (almost nothing's running, and a very minimal set of packages is installed), but Gentoo is a hardware hungry, space chewing, memory gulping distro. That's not really bad - new hardware is fast and new hard drives are massive, but installing Gentoo (espescially X and related) on a old slow machine requires the patience of Job unless you have some beefier machines to help out. For some, it's worth it, but some people new to Gentoo may just try throwing it on one of their old machines and may get a bad impression of it because it takes too long.

Debian users do have a reputation for being aarogant, but Gentoo users are no better (maybe worse). All the Debian braggarts and l33t d00dz are always making noise in /. threads, and Gentoo users are getting a reputation for being arrogant, and Gentoo's being labled (unfairly IMO) as the "flavor of the month".

...gotta run... Will post more later about what Debian _should_ learn from Gentoo (i.e. the good things).
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TheCoop · Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2002 10:14 pm Post subject:

gentoo - you either love it or hate it, most ppl who love it come from debian backgrounds, the other distros dont seem that affected...
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Vann · Guru Joined: 04 Aug 2002 Posts: 357

I probably have one of the stranger distro paths: RedHat -> Mandrake -> LFS -> Gentoo

The problems I had with RedHat and Mandrake were two-fold: more often than not the layout and ideologies of each distro got in your way, and if you needed some obscure dependency it was a pain in the ass to find.

Well, LFS dealt kindly with the first one, and when I used Debian briefly I found that it dealt kindly with the last one. The sombination of USE flags and the source-based nature of Gentoo is, for me anyhow, the perfect compromise.

KiTaSuMbA · Guru Joined: 28 Jun 2002 Posts: 430 Location: Naples Italy

phong: the usefulness of optimizations differs for any range of apps. Going from my 386-based slack8 to a "death-wish" - optimized LFS can teach you that much! So although I agree that the source-based speed enhancement expectations are over-hyped, I wouldn't as far as regarding the gain irrelevant.

TheCoop: well, I for example did not try debian until after I became a regular gentoo user. Haven't I tried gentoo before, I would probably like debian but going from portage and USE flags to apt was a bit of disappointment. I think it's a more generic trend picking up people from distros that at least try to empower the user (slack being the other significant "victim" although most of its users are already too "faithful" to abandon it - heck, there is no way I can trash that partition although it's been six months I practically don't use slack :wink:

)
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Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

I find it suprising no one has mentioned the fact that Gentoo the only mainstream distro that uses gcc3 for everything. That's what brought me to Gentoo in the first place. That debian thread talked about debian's difficulties in migrating, but no one's mentioned it here.

Then all the other benefits kept me here. (rc-update, use flags, near-complete lack of bloat, that warm fuzzy (although functionally meaningless) feeling of complete and utter control over my computer....) Then there's the fact that it's the most up to date mainstream distro out there. (speaking of which, when's mozilla getting updated? :evil:

Source for 1.2.1 has been posted)

Was an interesting read though. I think another one of Gentoo's advantages that hasn't been mentioned here is that it's a new distro- our 'system' is laid out the way it made the most sense a year ago as opposed to debian/slack/rh/mdk being laid out the way it made the most sense 7-8 years ago. Old established distro's can't just pick up and abandon older systems very easily- we don't have any old systems/baggage to abandon.

The discussions of making compiler optimised binary packages was pretty funny though. One of the most wholly impractical ideas I've ever heard.

Bad things about Gentoo- it's too easy to hose a system by unmerging a package that other parts of your system depends on. Being able to easily get a list of installed packages that depend on any given packages would be a huge help.

Malakin · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 1:53 am Post subject:

Pigeon · Guru Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 307

lmao, really? I thought mdk was experimenting with it but it wasn't getting released soon...

Anyway, Gentoo has has been quite functional in 3.x ever since 1.3 came around.

plate · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 2:59 am Post subject:

MDK 9.0, RH 8.0 and SuSE 8.1 are all based on gcc3.2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't imply the absence of statically linked binaries, does it? I imagine there are lots of commercial applications left in all three distros that were compiled with pre-3 gcc. But it's true, none of the majors have been outwitted by Gentoo on all accounts, and they certainly managed to keep a few advantages over Gentoo: Some people report significant speed gains thanks to a heavily modified KDE on Mandrake 9.0, installation routines in all three distros go further and faster, hardware support is excellent even on disreputable notebooks (beware of the V word: Vaio

) thanks to cleverly patched kernels, to the point of near perfection in SuSE 8.1, or so I've heard.

So maybe we all just did fall for the hype? But before we could do that, Gentoo had to ascend to hype status first, and I'm particularly glad that the reasons for that ascension are all pretty clearly stated wherever you go, even in the most unlikely of places like a Debian forum. Conditional compilation. The init system. USE flags. Portage. Portage. Portage.

Speaking about the hype: move along, people, there's absolutely nothing to see here. :wink:

mikki · n00b Joined: 14 Jul 2002 Posts: 51 Location: On Top

Gentoo is a hyped, flavor-of-the-month distro?

I must not be hooked into the right hype channels. I keep thinking it's like my happy little secret...

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riceboy50 · n00b Joined: 12 Nov 2002 Posts: 48 Location: Southern CA

I am pretty new to linux compared to most people here considering I didn't know anything about it until my roomate gave me a copy of Red Hat 7.1, and I have been using it up until 7.3 at which point I was tired of how much excess was installed and how confusing the structure was for a newbie like me. I decided to look into Gentoo after reading up on several of the main distros and because of the recommendation of a friend from my local #linux community (not on a public server). So for that reason I can't really say I came because of the hype since he never said anything about the distro except to check it out. The hype for me came when I actually read into it and started getting excited about it. I have learned more about Linux in two months than I did in two years of using Red Hat. I think this is a great distro for educated computer users but n00b's to Linux. I really appreciate the guides provided and helpful answers I've received in the forums. Keep up the good work and forget about what's in and what's not. All that matters is reality and the reality is that Gentoo is just a really well done distro.
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bleakcabal · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 3:54 am Post subject:

Actually I was a total newbie and I managed to install and run Gentoo. I took me more than a week to get the installation right ( with much help from the forums ), there are a few things that still don't work as they are supposed to ( X wm selector at boot ). I can't get my floppy to work and still haven't bothered trying to install my burner ( I don't have the time right now anyway ). Some things I still don't know how to do ( change the wm in kDE ).

But if you consider the fact that I was a noob, a window refugee, I did pretty well. Since then I have been running on Gentoo, happily with few problems. I do write my term papers on OpenOffice, use UML Modeller and Dia to do some UML, write Java code with Eclipse, surf the web, chat on IRC, "share" files with gtk-gnutella, use Everybuddy to IM my friends, I play .divx from cd's, play MP3s. I have even made Unreal Tournament ( not 2003

my comp is to weak for it ) and Return To Castle Wolfentstein ( don't worry I own both with legit copies ) two of my former window games. If only I could use my Tribes 2 Windows CD to play T2 in Linux and everything would be perfect.

B_F_Skinner · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 5:04 am Post subject:

I am a former Debian user. I was very happy with Debian, except it seemed to me a bit sluggish and the software release cycle a bit slow.

It was with great fear and trepidation that I tried Gentoo. The reveiws I read indicated Gentoo was only for "experts" or "power users." Being relatively new to the Linux scene, I hardly consider myself either of those.

But, I wanted some apps (mostly desktop stuff), and I was tired of tyring to get them working in Debian.

So, I tried Gentoo.

I was pleasantly surprised. I found the documentation and forums delightful, and my system works beautifully. Even when I completely borked my system with an unstable gcc, I was able to find the documentation I needed to recover.

Compiling from source often tests my patience, but I am (with very few exceptions) always pleased with the end result. The few packages I need that are not available via emerge I have been able to compile myself, with no problems because all the dependencies are up to date.

I still have nostalgia for Debian. I wish it had optimization for i686. I wish it had "USE" flags or "rc-update" features. But it doesn't.

What I don't understand, is why the two distributions should compete. I mean, they are so very similar and both have large followings. The social contract is nearly identical. Why not combine the two distributions (and give users the choice of apt-get or emerge)?

nzer · n00b Joined: 21 Apr 2002 Posts: 34 Location: Auckland, NZ

My first disto was Debian, its great, apt is good, its stable, its easy to install and configure. BUT .. Gentoo is fast, portage is incredible and the runlevel stuff is so easy to work out for a change. I tried Sorcerer (i think it was called) which was really similar to Gentoo.. but it lost support and dissapeared.

The only thing I can see me changing my Desktop machine to is Evil Entity Linux (http://www.undeadlinux.net) .. hah I like the idea of that distro.. A completely desktop orientated distro designed for fun.

I think the whole OS war thing is a bit funny really. Microsoft make a decent OS for the majority of people and the majority of people just want something that works. If I were the Debian guys and saw a new up and coming distro i'd help it out to give more momentum to the Linux movement. Linux is quite good now (than even 2 years ago) , but its not there yet and all the distro wars and the RTFM type people don't really help anything.

My 0.02

uncle_meat · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 25 Nov 2002 Posts: 93

zawze · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2002 Posts: 17 Location: Tau, Norway

Gentoo fits me quite well. I use Gentoo because it has updated packages, gcc3 and very good documentation . I'm also a fan of compiling programs on my machine from source - as that gives me the opportunity to test the newest versions of applications. I never ran into any problems during installation of the system and the various applications I use for my workstation. And not to mention the rc-update and USE flags options. That was my 5 cent.

carmiac · n00b Joined: 25 Aug 2002 Posts: 46

The gentoo community is a major bonus for me. I was a BeOS user back when Be, Inc was Doing The Right Thing(tm), and the community was very helpful. It has been great finding that here.

*warm fuzzies*

Empty_One · n00b Joined: 18 Oct 2002 Posts: 32

Well, I started with slack 7 and fell in love with linux and the freedom it offered. I liked the control I had in that distro, but started to hate the package system, and searching for obscure dependencies. When Patrick got rid of the forums on slackware.com, I felt it was time for me to move on. I was put off by Red Hat and MDK, after hearing about rpm hell, so I gave Debian a shot.

I loved it, and actually still do. To me, nothing was better than apt-get. Type in what you want to install, and all dependencies come along with it? Sounded perfect. But around the time of KDE3 and Gnome2 were starting to get talked about, I started to get sick of how slow Debian evolves. As I learned more, and read about new features in packages, I wanted to do new things, but couldn't due to limitations in the dated packages Debian offered.

While reading COLA, people started talking about gentoo, how configurable it was, how the user was in total control of his system, and I started to get excited. Then I heard about portage, and I knew I had found my new distro.

Gentoo merged the best things about my two favorite distro's, total control, and awesome package management. How could I not use it, hype be damned!

pilla · Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2002 4:51 pm Post subject:

I think that the best thing about Gentoo is the Forum. It is very comprehensive and you'll usually find somebody to help you.

The second best thing is that you really know what is going on under the hood. While most users don't need (and don't want) to know how the bloody init scripts are configured, you can learn a lot about GNU/Linux just by following the manuals and howtos you can find in the Forums (the Forums, again :lol:

).

The third best thing is that the packages are usually very updated and bleeding edge (if you need it, or if you like to play with betas). It is quite a PINA (Pain In The Ass) to update KDE in a Red Hat box, for example, but it is usually a simple emerge in Gentoo (welllll, not always

)