For those of you thinking about quitting...

Pulaski47 · n00b Joined: 06 Apr 2005 Posts: 13

... don't.

I've made several attempts at running a linux desktop since my senior year in high school. Now, 4 years later, i think i've finally come through. I started with a duel boot in Red Hat and windows. Then I got a new 'puter and was able to experiement with slackware and freeBSD for a while. I still kept windows on my faster PC though, mainly because it did everything for me. No hassle. Any idiot can use it. For some people, thats nice. I had been using XP for 3 years. This year I was told by the m$ media that i needed to update to SP2 in order to stop intruders. After my SP2 upgrade everything pretty much went in a downward spiral. My MMC would lock up everytime, so I couldn't do any system administration. Then my add/remove programs stopped working, disallowing me from deleteing that stupid "weatherbug" that comes bundled with AIM. Finally, my search program stopped working. This was pretty much the last straw. About 5 days ago I downloaded Gentoo 2005, and about 30 minutes ago I finally got everything configured.

I've always wanted a Linux system, it seems so rebellious and cool. Sure i've fscked things up when doing installing or kernel work. Who hasn't? Don't give in to thinking that you can't do it though. There are so many benefits! For one you get an amazing system that you can customize at every level. Second, you learn so much about these machines in the process. Third, you can be different from the mindless hordes that use Microsoft products.

So don't give up. There's always people to help you. Read everything. I'm not a cs major or anything, i just like to do things my way. Thats why I use Linux.

-c

WhiteWolfkiba · Posted: Thu Apr 07, 2005 5:41 am Post subject:

Amen I am 16 years old, I have used winblows for eight years. I made my first webpage under windows, I met my first online buddy in windows, I played my first computer game in windows. I have used windows 3.1-XP, one thing that has been consistant is the instability progressivly getting worse and worse. I thought it was unheard of when XP took over 32 megs of ram just to idle. I have had to buy a faster computer to run just windows and maybe a few other programs. With the advent of XP SP2 security holes filled the system, along with many compatibility issues with most of my software. I switched to linux on december 2nd 2004, at first things seemed difficult, but I had the will to learn. For new users there is infact a learning curve its not a big one though, once you learn your way around bash your pretty much set. and MOST people will not flame you for simple questions ("whats 'lilo'? isnt that a cartoon character?") the only thing I am disatisfied with linux is the game support. But that is software developers fault not linux.

Linux is a growing threat to m$, and they know it to. They have already taken percautions to help stomp WINE (www.winehq.com) and m$'s anti linux campaign has them launching some free software to try and compete.

Dang billgates is paraniod microsoft has already started making the new version of IE, firefox is slowly taring away at their stock. So m$ is gonna get the media on their side and try and win the war. Back in 1990's netscape and internet explorer wars were at large, internet explorer won then. Now firefox will take on the giant, has it awoken the sleeping giant? Or will david take down galliath.

Billgates was knighted (the black night FYI) for being a rich bitch.

M$ is bad all around these days which is why I switched to linux. and it will stay that way for a VERY long time. best part about linux is I dont have to upgrade my hardware to keep up with software. I used to have to buy a new PC each year. I have had this one for about 3 now. yay linux!
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aqua26 · Guru Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 313 Location: India

welcome to gentoo.

well MS is porting their longhorn soon.
So i think that will also affect.
in facts it won't be free, u have to pad $$$$
launching of longhorn will help increse linux users. :lol:

But anyways gentoo Linux rocks.
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Johnyp · Guru Joined: 23 Mar 2005 Posts: 301

Don't quit - is a good message. I'm 100% with you on that one.
MS Windows is crap - is a bad (and wrong) message.

Linux, Windows and every other OS on the planet have 1 thing in common - it takes knowledge and some skills to keep them running smoothly. Windows has never failed me and I work in IT (heck - 95% of all stations and servers we support are Windows based). Not saying that MS doesn't mess up from time to time, but usually things can be fixed (just as in linux). And yes, sometimes i had to do a complete whipe and build everything from scratch. But most of those times it was HW that caused a major data corruption, not the OS itself.

Anyway - yea, keep up the good work with Linux/Unix... it sure helps to keep the options open.

P.S. unfortunately Linux is not a threat to a Windows desktop. Windows works out of the box for almost anyone (even those who have never seen a computer before). And linux, well - you better know what you doing.

It always comes down to administrations skills.
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stonent · Veteran Joined: 07 Aug 2003 Posts: 1139 Location: Texas

electrofreak · l33t Joined: 30 Jun 2004 Posts: 713 Location: Ohio, USA

As you said... the only thing that is a bad thing about linux is the game support. This is actually the only reason I haven't switched to linux. Sure, many games can work in linux... but they usually take a lot of work to get to work. Dual boot isn't an option here since I would just be booting way to much.

Well, I am usually willing to try to get a game to work on my own time, but if a friend brings a game over for me to try... it would be a bad label for linux to the normal unknowning person.

KezzerDrix · n00b Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 37 Location: USA

As a dual booter myself I think he had it right at "duel" boot. My two os's duel it out every boot up and right now I have a broken Lilo. Not to mention getting Mirco$oft to even let me boot Linux on the rear partition.

(Gaming + Linux)\majority = sucks

However, the games that do Linux THANK YOU EPIC & ID are absolutley great. UT2K4, Doom3 etc.
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Insanity5902 · Posted: Fri Apr 08, 2005 7:01 pm Post subject:

[slight rant]

Every post here is saying don't quit gentoo MS sucks.

Most the poeple who are leaving Gentoo aren't leaving to go back the MS, my guess is most are going to a different distro, maybe even a different *nix enviroment. One that is easier to configure and work with. Gentoo is made for people who like to fiddle with their computer and their OS. Good is never good enough. That is how I am , and that is how I am sure most people on this forum are. Yeah I get tired of the 5+ hour compile session for OpenOffice, but in the end i wouldn't have it any other way.

As time b/c more and more sparse for me I find it harder and harder to maintain my systems (2 active servers, 1 desktop and 1 laptop). In the end I know what I am doing in Gentoo and prefer it b/c of how robust it is.

From what I have seen, people who are leaving aren't leaving b/c the hate the distro, they are leaving b/c they dont' have the time or patience to maintain it anymore. They don't want to have to edit text files on every upgrade. They just want things to work. And hey, I can understand that completley. Gentoo is for everyone in every situation. I would never force gentoo on somebody or any of my clients. I also suggest linux as an alternative to everyone, and suggest gentoo when the oppurtunity presents itself.

I think flaming people when they leave is being a hyprocrit, isn't everything about choice ...

[/slight rant]

That being said, I love Gentoo, I have used linux for the past 4 years, and have been using gentoo for almost 1 1/2 years. I love gentoo, everything about it. I don't see myself switching to anything in the near future. It does everything I want it to, and still provides me with the fun of always playing with my system. I never get bored

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aqua26 · Guru Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 313 Location: India

i love the option of thunderbird & firefox.
U can emerge Thunderbird the old fashion way or u can emerge thunderbird-bin
which will be proper or sute to individual style.
i don't know how but
if most of the pkgs r having this option it will be gr8 & users will increase amazingly.
i don't know if this is good or not.
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KezzerDrix · n00b Joined: 31 Mar 2005 Posts: 37 Location: USA

Okay wait a minute

Insanity5902

"They don't want to have to edit text files on every upgrade. They just want things to work."

You don't really have to edit text files after uprgrading do you. I was under the impression that gentoo has the best system maintenace system. That if you suffer through the 100 pg manual and the difficult installation process that you would be set and that Portage was a cure all, compared to other distros.
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Insanity5902 · Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2005 7:34 am Post subject:

krolden · Posted: Sun Apr 10, 2005 9:09 pm Post subject:

kjs · n00b Joined: 10 Apr 2005 Posts: 1

this is exactly my experience after a weekend of trying to install gentoo. I'm a Linux user since 1998 (SuSE) and wanted to have the beauty of just updating everything without waiting for the next release. This naturally combined with the advantage that it's compiled for my PC hardware.
After running 2 PC's just to be able to read the documentation parallel to all these lengthy command lines, looking up what the choices mean (would be asked too much to have them on the screen) I finally gave up (after 14h) and within 1.5h I had SuSE 9.2 PRO and all programs I need installed.
Unless gentoo gets user friendly I won't try it again and stick to YaST even if the system may not be fully optimized. It's definately not a distro I would recommend to anybody who views the PC as a tool and not as a toy to play with the operating system. But for a geek distro it's pretty good.
Sure, a setup tool is usually only used once to install the system (and in case of YaST to maintain it) but without one most people won't have the patience nor the experience to install it.

Juergen
(the one back on SuSE, a $20 experience)

Sorcerer'sApprentice · Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2005 8:32 pm Post subject:

I only see two big problems with Gentoo:

I've already found a solution to the first problem: Vidalinux. The install is very quick and easy, then edit make.conf, emerge sync, emerge -uvD world. Voila, up-to-date Gentoo box. You can also use the computer while it doing the emerge world, something which you won't be able to do with the upcoming Gentoo installer (which does however offer a nice happy medium).

As for the second problem, I do see more binaries appearing all the time, but some packages, eg. gcc, glibc++ are absolute killers, and I see no obvious solution to this (you can always leave it running overnight). This is however, the one reason that I may not recommend Gentoo to someone.

Portage is easily the best package manager I've ever used, and the configuration is also very easy. dispatch-conf gets rid of most of the hastle. As for major changes to config syntax, it would be nice to see ebuilds processing the old config, in an attempt to ease the transition.

As for games, dual boot. I use Windows as a games console. There is nothing of importance on the partition (apart from my Pro Evolution master league team

). If it goes foobar, I'll format it and start again. I do everything else in Linux; it is attractive, responsive and (touch wood) stable! Windows is none of those.

PS. I would like to echo the sentiment of the original post. I've been using Linux for a few years and encountered many problems, but things change so quickly in the Linux world that by the next day, a patch will have been submitted. So many things that were not possible when I started now are. The communities a great (especially Gentoo); there are so many people willing to offer their help. If you have a problem, ask for help. The stupidest question is the question not asked.
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wjholden · l33t Joined: 01 Mar 2004 Posts: 826 Location: Augusta, GA

I tried Vidalinux a long time ago and was not impressed. The config files are often very different from those you would expect to see from the Gentoo handbook, trying to switch over to KDE wasn't easy when I tried it, and installing a package from source using their generic USE flags breaks some packages (like MySQL and PHP). Vidalinux probably makes a great desktop or whatever, but I honestly don't recommend it to anyone. If you want easy Linux get Fedora or Ubuntu (sp?). If you want an operating system you can call your own, there's Gentoo and there's Slackware. I have a friend who uses Slackware only because he doesn't believe in using a package manager - period. I guess that's hardcore and all, but I have just as much control over my system as he does and I've yet to experience dependency hell with portage (/me cringes remembering RedHat 9.0).

I don't mean to flame Vidalinux, but really, anyone using it is trying to use Gentoo without reading the handbook and that does not fly. Portage is too high-maintenence for users with no understanding of how it works (which applies to many Gentoo users as well -- man emerge is your friend!).

Sorcerer'sApprentice · Posted: Wed Apr 13, 2005 4:03 pm Post subject:

I agree that Gentoo is probably too involved for some Linux noobs, but I would recommend it to my braver friends, who don't mind being thrown in at the deep end. It is worth the toil to be able to use Portage (although you can in theory run it on other distributions). However, I really don't think that Portage is that complicated to use: how hard is it to do emerge sync && emerge -uvD world every now and then?

As I said in my initial post, I do think that doing a 'proper' Gentoo install is definately worth doing once, as there is a great deal to be learned from it (I'd never heard of the chroot command), but it does mean that your PC is out of action for the best part of a day. I was suggesting Vidalinux as a quick way of laying down a Stage 3 + packages install, which can then be used during the time that you do an emerge -e world or whatever. I haven't noticed the config files being that different, but you only need to edit make.conf, then all of the others can be returned to the default using emerge -e world and some automerging of config files. The most complicated thing about any Linux distribution (not just Gentoo) is application specific config files (but as you said man is your friend). I think that the Gentoo config files very easy to use, as they are intuitive and well documented.
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chadders · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 113

I saw a signature that said there were 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't. Gentoo is like that, there are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that think computers and operating systems are a magic box and those don't.

I have been using Gentoo since i was 13 and its NOT THAT HARD. What was hard was getting to know about Unix commands and filesystems and kernels and how everthing fits together. After that Gentoo is just a easier way to get Linux from source (scratch) running and kept up to date.

My real dad is a ham radio guy. He knows all about how radios work inside. I hate radios (especially morse code) He calls me a radio appliance operator. It is OK for people to be appliance operators if they don't WANT to know about the inside stuff. BUT PLEASE DONT MAKE GENTOO BE JUST AN APPLIANCE! I like being able to poke around inside and mess it up and fix it and make it do weird cool stuff.

Some people like radios, some like working on car engines, some like cooking. Everyone needs to be a expert at something. Gentoo is for Linux experts. Where else can you see all the source and make your own encrypted file system or kernel syscalls or way weird desktop AND not have to worry all the time about what needs a new version?

So, I only got one thing to say: EITHER MAKE IT BETTER OR MOVE ON BECAUSE GRUMBLING JUST GIVES ME A HEADACHE.

Chadders

P.S. Don't anyone bash me about hating morse code, because my dad MADE me learn it and I passed a 20wpm FCC test when I was 12 and its still stupid!

Vulpes_Vulpes · Posted: Thu Apr 14, 2005 2:43 pm Post subject:

Q-collective · Advocate Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 2071

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moleculardeconstruction · Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2005 2:06 am Post subject:

I have a dual boot with WinXP, but I'm finding myself more and more not using windows, just because of the hassle of rebooting. There is still some music authoring software that I need windows for (haven't mastered musicTex yet). Windows seems so slow now, compared to the speed of Gentoo.

Gaming still also occasionally sees me in windows, but even that is becoming less frequent.

Installing Gentoo on my housemate's machine this weekend. He tried it a few years ago but drifted back to windows. He's ready for another go.

Gentoo is very much worth the time it takes. Portage makes everything so easy.
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beissemj · Posted: Sun Apr 24, 2005 4:55 am Post subject:

I started using linux almost a year ago. I tried mandrake, and I was not a fan of that at all (dependency hell is all i have to say about that

. Anyways one day my friend suggested I give linux another go and he suggested gentoo. I was like ok. So I spent the weekend installing gentoo...only took me about three or four tries to get it right :wink:

And ever since then I've been hooked. I had a "duel" boot on my laptop for awhile, but once SP2 borked my windows install and I tried to reinstall I said the **** with it (windows does not play nice with grub and the mbr). I wanted something that doesn't do anything I don't tell it to do. Needless to say I found it.

Granted it was a HUGE learning curve b/c I didn't start out with KDE or GNOME, i decided I was gonna be "hardcore" and learn how use linux with fluxbox. Looking back I'm glad I didn't start out with either of those two b/c I have learned SOOOO much just out of necessity. man <program> is your friend and so are the forums. I have probably spent well over 100 hours reading posts/documents/man pages but its been well worth it.

Siropel · n00b Joined: 12 Apr 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Romania

i don`t think someone who knows what he is doing quits gentoo ... gentoo is the ultimate distro, on top of the linux chain ...
people start using linux, mandrake or redhat at first, then upgrading to debian, then discovering gentoo ...
everyone is gotta find his distro, the one that makes him confortable ... (it took me 9 months)
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