"Are we losing users to Gentoo?"

Wrawrat · Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2003 6:19 pm Post subject:

I started out with Redhat 5.2, but I quicky switched back to Windoze because I was scared by Gnome. I tried Redhat 6.0~6.2, but I always got back to Windoze because of issues (RPM hell, general instabity).

Then I tried Slackware 7.0. Not very user-friendly, but I learned a lot with it. Unfortunately, most software/games were Windoze only, so although I installed Slacky in dual-boot, I rarely booted on it. The same thing happened with 7.1 and 8.0... I eventually got a second rig when 8.1 came out last year, so I installed it on it. I played a bot with it, but it wasn't my main machine... I sadly sold that rig to one of my "friends" because I wasn't really using it (and I made *profits* on a 9-months old rig! :twisted:

).

I read the LFS books 3.1 and 3.2... I was very interested in building my own distro, but I was too lazy to do so on my main rig.

I wanted to go back to Linux, but I didn't found any suitable distro (read: BSD-like). Slackware was good, but outdated. I also hated their package management system. Somebody gave me a link for Gentoo about 3 months ago... and I'm using it since then. I still dual-boot, but I'll probably switch over to Gentoo Linux once I find the apps I need on it. I really like the Portage system, and I love the community. There's not a lot of docs, but the forum is compensating all the missing doc! I'm proud to say that Gentoo Linux is the distro that will make me get rid of Windoze.

vers_iq · Apprentice Joined: 18 May 2002 Posts: 264

heliosc · n00b Joined: 30 Jun 2002 Posts: 13

Came for the hype. Stayed because it fscking kicked ass!

Seriously. I originally heard of Gentoo when I went to look for info about Enoch Linux (a i686-optimized Linux distro that preceeded Gentoo). I started using it with 1.0_rc3. I switched to it as my main OS almost a year ago, and haven't looked back since. Having used both Debian and Gentoo, I can say that Gentoo easily stands up to Debian, hype or no hype.

1) To run a usable Debian desktop installtation, you need to run either testing or unstable. At that point, most of that vaunted QA goes out the window. While rare in both, broken packages are more common on Debian unstable than in Gentoo (even though I run ~x86).
2) The rc system, and the conf.d and env.d mechanisms are inspired. The equivilent mechanisms in other distros are so opaque and poorly documented, because they assume only the distro maintainers will modify them.
3) Portage rocks. Not only is it much more powerful than APT (which is awesome too), but it's easy to use. The best part is probably the software database. I've never seen a distro with CVS packages, or one where creating a package was so easy that users could whip one up and post them on a forum.
4) Gentoo is just so friendly. The NVIDIA driver ebuilds automagically patches the kernel module if it detects you're running a 2.5 kernel. I've never seen anything like that.
5) The art is just so much cooler!

zombie · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 59 Location: Montreal

Cheers.

Gentoo is the first distro that makes me feel like a kid again. Debian is awesome for what it is, slackware too, but I find em stiff and boring. They're the kind of distros you install on critical machines. Gentoo is sexy, the community is (yes, I'll say it again, because you deserve it guys and gals) AWESOME. The words "friendly" and "linux" used to not fit well together. It's not true anymore. And the open source dream tastes so much better when the people making it true don't behave like elitist assholes.

Plus, I agree with every single point in your post. And it feels good to tell the world about it just now

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AFCommando · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 59

I probably won't be able to say anything that no one else hasn't already said about gentoo.

I switched over to gentoo just about a month or two ago, after hearing about the crap RH was doing with their adv server and other stuff like making the EOF of RH 8.0 the end of this year and such. I set out to look for a linux distro that didn't do the stuff i didn't like RH doing like modifying almost everything before creating the RPMs. Like modifying the kernel instead of using stock and stuff like that. Now as far as regular packages are concern, I don't know how much gentoo modifies them, I know there are some patches for stuff like the kernel2.5 patch for the Nvidia packages. But as far as I could tell it was pretty much stock. I like how I got the choice to choose which kernel I wanted to install whether it was stock from kernel.org or gentoo's or someone else's. All these choices was what kept me to gentoo from trying other distros.

Also the idea of compiling all the stuff yourself for you own system was wonderful to me and the USE flags are truely what sets gentoo out from other distros. I love being in control, and with gentoo I am. I know pretty much everything that goes into my system. Whether I know what it does or not, is another matter but when I do a emerge -p mozilla and I see that it wants to install usb packages, I can go WTF and edit my USE flags and add -usb and they won't be installed. This is the kind of control I love to have.

Another thing that has kept me to gentoo, was the community and the forums. After using gentoo already for a month or so, I have yet to have to post a question in the forums. I have posted but not any question. Because someone has already asked it and I merely had to google on the net for general questions, or I just searched the forums for a gentoo specific question. The community here is very friendly and I thank you all for making this distro such a wonderful one.

kha · n00b Joined: 19 Mar 2003 Posts: 41

I was, And for the most part I am still a BSD user. On th eserver part I still could not find a linux distrib that would compete in terms of speed and reliability with a FreeBSD or an OpenBSD. But both of them are completly useless when it commes to everyday workstation use.
FreeBSD seems to be going this way, but it still requires a level of skill you can't expect from a standard end user.
So if for the server part my choice is immediatly made, I have been hanging around, looking for a good workstation distrib for quite a long time now. I have tried Mandrake, but it was way to obscure to my taste. Too many things working "automagically" until you try to upgrade or to patch. I wanted to have Firewire, usb, acpi etc. on my laptop. So I tried Gentoo and I am really happy with it.

Even if the "USE" flag system is great, there is still quite a lot of problems with the emerge/portage system. I ended doing quite a lot of emerge -i and installing from the official sources on the side. This is especially true when installing servers. I have tried 2 so far : apache and postgresql, in both case i was quite horrified by the default installation choices. So I went for the official sources and forgot about the ebuild.

Appart form this, I am definitly convinced by Gentoo,and I will stay on this system.

Kha
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nrl · Guru Joined: 27 Mar 2003 Posts: 446 Location: Glasgow, UK

Although most of the posts on the mailing list thread show these Debian users (mainly developers perhaps) as pretty arrogant as an ex Debian user myself I must point out that I recieved nothing but useful help from the #debian IRC channel.
However they are not very forgiving to those who ask others rather than reading the manuals/man pages and searching google but well that's just the way they are.
I don't really need to echo others by now posting the almost obligatory "Gentoo forums rock!" comment, but they do so I will

.

zombie · n00b Joined: 06 Sep 2002 Posts: 59 Location: Montreal

Gentoo forums do rock, so yeah it's good to mention it. That said, yeah, the debian forums are often very helpful too, and getting pissed with newbies is understandable, except, it hurts people

Was it that bad to kick em in the teeth so hard they actually ended up reading the goddam man page? Maybe not, maybe the debian police was right. Might have helped some of them.

But being nice helped the rest. Because people shouldn't have to prove anything when they get interrested in something like linux. I know it's very k3wl to act like assholes and make em feel as if they had to "pass the test". But real life is too short. Just give em good tips, accessible documentation, a pat on the back, and watch em learn. Attitude doesn't feed anybody, doesn't pay the bills, doesn't make you happier in the end. People are eager to learn, people are fragile, people deserve respect.

Yeah. It's not that expensive to be nice. And some of us are tired. Gentoo is about that too. Never forget that, all of you debian tyrans out there. If the gentoo phenomena is growing so fast, it has to be because of something you didn't do right.
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bammbamm808 · Guru Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 548 Location: Hawaii

My experience:
MDK, Slack, Gentoo, with an abortive LFS in there somewhere

I tried Gentoo on a lark, not having heard very much about it. I expected it be unstable, difficult and poorly supported. I couldn't have been more wrong. I installed it on one of my secondary 20GB HDDs and eperimented with it for a few weeks. Soon my beloved Slackware was relegated to the 20GB and a low position on my lilo.conf, and Gentoo was on the 60GB and up top of my bootmenu. It runs all my games, wine-enabled and native better than any other distro has, and aside from some lengthy compiles, it makes updating rather painless. The community is intelligent, knowledgable and obviously lacking the chip-on-the-shoulder that some other distros' enthusiasts seem to be sporting. Congratulations and thanks to you all. Pats on the back all around.
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bammbamm808 · Guru Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 548 Location: Hawaii

dh003i2 · Posted: Thu May 01, 2003 8:40 pm Post subject: gentoo's HD/memory req.

phong wrote:

jimbo · n00b Joined: 17 Apr 2003 Posts: 31

I've used these:

RedHat, Mandrake, Caldera, Slackware, SUSe, Debian

And even these:

Knoppix, EvilEntity, Vector, Lycoris, Crux, Arch, LRS, Yoper

But only these were really worth it:

Arch, Slackware, Knoppix

And only THIS proved to be the best:

Gentoo

'Nuff said?
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The Jaff · n00b Joined: 14 Mar 2003 Posts: 26 Location: Sweden

Granini · n00b Joined: 08 May 2003 Posts: 11 Location: Germany

I really dont like Debian.
Debian stable is much too old and i never got debian unstable working.

Gentoo has a better Homepage where i can find documentation very easy.
And portage is much better than apt-get.

Bytal · Posted: Fri May 09, 2003 2:24 pm Post subject:

Switched to Gentoo from Windows XP(before that mandrake/debian) since last October and have never looked back. The forums are just awesome, the installation instructions were so easy to follow, the newest packages that come out almost as soon as the newest progs are released, full control of your system. In fact since I have a pretty powerfull machine (Athlon xp 1800) and a DSL connection this is the perfect distro for me to use. Even with compilation most packages install in under 30 mins. Huge assortment of interesting programs with an extremely easy way to handle all the dependencies. Heck I even have most of my games from Windows working on Gentoo. Everything from Quake3/Urban Terror to NeverWinterNights to even Warcraft 3 using WineX. Gentoo just plain rocks. I will be in heaven when Tony Hawk 3 works

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stimuli · Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 6:36 am Post subject:

I never realised until reading this thread that gentoo was 'trendy'. I came to gentoo from RPM-based distros (LinuxPPC2000, LinuxPPCR4, Yellowdog 1.2, 1.4, 2.0) for three reasons:

1) Escape "dependancy hell"

2) Run the latest and greatest (while escaping dep. hell

). Like Gnome2, Xfree 4.3, GCC 3.2, etc.

3) Install only what I want, and have it optimised for my TiBook.

So while it's definately for 'power users' I don't think of gentoo as 1337, necessarily.

Installing Gnome 2, after base install, was as simple as typing
emerge gnome2
and going to sleep. Come morning, G2 and all its dependancies were installed! How rad is that?!

edit: Oh, yeah, and these forums are rad too. Solved many a problem by searching and posting.

edit2: My desktop has been fluxbox/aterm/gkrellm/xmms for 5 months now. Cool to use Gnome2, if only to discover I don't particularly like it

Naughtyus · Posted: Tue May 13, 2003 7:52 am Post subject:

I was running Debian previously, but found it very hard to get some things to work. When I heard about Gentoo (between 1.0 & 1.2 sometime), I tried it. All of the things I couldn't get working in Debian were easy in Gentoo, so thats why I switched.

Davin · n00b Joined: 13 May 2003 Posts: 45 Location: United States

Personally, I used Sorcerer/Sorcery/Whatever before switching to Gentoo. It did the trick for me at the time, but as time progressed I found on more than one occasion that I wanted to trash my current system state and recompile from scratch. Nevermind the ever-shifting chain of command...

I found Gentoo when I was looking for an OS that supported the Sparc platform, since I had one or two servers I wanted to play around with. (Solaris didn't do much for me) Overall, Gentoo did the same thing as Sorcery while keeping everything quite organized; it also felt more "professional", since even the simple startup scripts looked crisp and without erronous output ala Sorcery. Gentoo started on my Sparc and moved to my personal Poweredge 4300; it's staying there for awhile.

On the subject of Gentoo in the work environment:

derk · Posted: Wed May 14, 2003 5:35 am Post subject:

I've found gentoo to be quite a change from other linux distributions and I've used a lot of them. The beauty of having many choices is that each can be used as desired. My first install of linux was with the debian installer and all it's quirks.

I do still use debian (the first distro I tried was version 1.2 I think) especially on a particularly flakey machine that will not complete very large ebuilds .. seems to be a hardware problem but since I'm just using it as an X-term to my main machine debian fits the bill as a precompiled system for this purpose (it can also function as a stand alone if necessary with a gnome based install of unstable)

We must remember that the rich linux base we have now we owe in large part to the people who made and developed debian gnu linux with high standards and good security in mind. Of course we can't ignore the contributions of Redhat, Slackware and many other distributions in the early years either. But debian's contribution is unique in the way it was formed and administered as a non-commercial distribution staffed by volunteers from the beginning and maintained this way to this day.

Don't forget some debian based source packages are used for some of the core Gentoo utilities.

derk

Vertice · n00b Joined: 23 May 2003 Posts: 1 Location: South Africa

bruor · Apprentice Joined: 08 Jul 2003 Posts: 239

before installing Gentoo i had never heard of it, i was a drake user then a crazy slack fan for a year or two.... i thought slack with the top of the ladder... i tried an LFS install and loved that but then i was doing some reading on distrowatch and wondered how gentoo had all the latest releases of software all teh time... so i checked out the install document to see what the deal was and jsut from reading the install document i was blown away i was pumped to read about gentoo and that it is basically LFS on steroids

great job to the developers out there, and that you for such an amazing distro!!

asimon · Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2003 8:19 am Post subject:

After reading this thread I think it seems I am the only Gentoo user who thinks that Gentoo's Portage is NOT (yet) as good as other package managers. It has still a very long way to go and IMO is years behind other popular package managers.

Still after all these years Portage has no backward dependencies. I think all other package managers have them. They are important.
Portage has no trigger mechanisms. If I update a library which break binary compatibility Portage should for example automatically update all packages which depend on this library (sometimes the developer offer shell scripts to do this). Portage can't differentiate between security update and other update, has no support for e.g. pgp signing, etc. I think I don't need to numerate all of Portage's shortcommings, you all know them.

But it always makes me wonder when people say that Portage rocks and is the best out there. I think otherwise.

jlambert · n00b Joined: 02 Mar 2003 Posts: 32

Excellent support and being able to have a system with ONLY what I want was what brought me here. no hype, no one telling me, just the pure joy of using Gentoo

lordofthemoose · n00b Joined: 10 Aug 2003 Posts: 11

Hi
I am a gentoo newcomer. I ran in the past Slackware , Redhat ,gave Mandrake 9 a brief try and hated it, Debian Woody, then unstable (when i got a DSL line:-). I dislike RPM based distribution, and was therefore very pleased when I discovered the APT dream.
Unfortunately (for me I mean, I know this is a design/ideologic choic), debian has a few drawbacks: stable (and even testing. has kde 3 at last reached testing? I don't think so) is too old for me, I don't like init scripts and (probably the worse) making it a decent workstation with usable desktop programs takes forever. You won't get package x or package y because it breaks this or that tiny bit of their social contract (I'm thinking about mplayer in particular).
I totally understand it -if you don't respect your own rules, you'll get nowhere- but from a desktop user's point of view it is annoying.
There comes gentoo. Same philosophy , amazing forums, total control, nice init scripts, fast (I can feel the difference), and it gives you a usable system right from the start, unlike debian. To be honest, when I emerged mplayer , I was absolutely flabbergasted when I saw I had the qt dll's with it. It would be perfect if portage had backward dependencies.
I still have my debian on my HD. But I think I'm going to stick with gentoo for aloooooooong time.