How to improve gentoo and why I'm leaving

josephdrivein · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 39

I have been using gentoo for two years now, on a 3800 X2 amd64, my home box, and I'm not completely satisfied with it. This is not meant to be a rant or how "gentoo sucks" post, I just wish to let you know why Gentoo was not the right distro for me, so maybe those things will be eventually improved and I'll be back. So no flames, please.

Here are the main things I didn't like about Gentoo:
1. Compiling wastes time. Often, I read post by people saying that you should use that time to do something else in the meanwhile, so it's not wasted. But that doesn't change the matter: you'll have to wait.
2. I have often read about improvements given by compiling software directly on the target machine. I don't belive there is any noticeable speed-up. Even if you got 1msec time save every time you run a program, since you probably wasted at least a couple of minutes compiling it, you have to execute it approximatively 120.000 times, then you'll hit the break-even point and you'll start saving a msec every time you run it.
In the end, it may really give you a real small speed increase, but you already wasted it compiling.
3. Portage is horribly broken and terribly slow. It has options (-P) that are known not to work properly and it's marked stable... Being slow it's probably Python's fault. Updating my packages list (the portage tree) alone takes almost 5min on my amd64 X2 with broadband connection. Doh. Aptitude takes real 0m5.774s (from time, sadly I can't post anymore the emerge time...) Download links are down sometimes, some ebuilds are broken, but you can fix them. Not that nice, btw.
4. Removing packages completely is a real pain. You may want to try -P (prune) to remove all unrequired packages, but that's broken... This is a hug problem in my opinion, that should be improved soon.
5. Packages are marked stable even if the developers themselves admit their software is not to be considered stable. That's odd and very different from Debian's stable.
6. Missing or unclear documentation. The official documentation is often outdated or missing, but the unofficial wiki is more up-to-date. Being unofficial, some articles are valuable, others are not. Otherwise you will have to ask on the forums, where the S/N level is very low. Important information is often printed out while compiling. I hate that.
7. Gentoo continuously bugs you until you update the config files of the programs you update. I love the command line, but continuosly editing configs has never been my greatest dream. I have better things to do, thank you.
8. Use flags are use-less. I chose mine when I first installed Gentoo, than changed just a couple in 2 years. And I don't belive they improve the performance that much. In fact, my Gentoo system seems exactly as fast as my previsious Debian system and as the new Debian system.
9. Network configuration is strange and never ended working correctly on my atheros card. I ended disabling all gentoo's net config, writing the scripts myself and having them executed by rc-local. That's not the clean way, that's not how I wish it to be done.

What I liked about it:
1. Software is very up to date.
2. My printer worked out the box. Debian/Ubuntu etc needed some hand configuration, nothing really difficult you need to get udev to flash the printer's firmware every time it's connected. Seeing it working without my assistance surprised me a lot. Good work.
3. Hey, it's linux!

In the end, Gentoo gave me a bad experience. I liked trying it out, but it wasn't surely something that was going to stay.
I'm back to (sweet) Debian.
Good luck.

j.

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Earthwings

I agree to most points (surprised?), except:

josephdrivein · n00b Joined: 05 Apr 2006 Posts: 39

Insanity5902 · Posted: Sat Nov 18, 2006 5:54 pm Post subject:

Well ... I did have a bunch of stuffed type out, but it started to sound like a flame so I started over.

In short, It is all about what you want out of your distrubution. Every distro will have it's faults, it is just finding one where the pros outweight the cons. For me, and many others, gentoo fits the bill. Some though find the opposite true, and like the hand-holding that Suse, Mandrake, etc provide.

Not every distro is meant for every linux user. And vice versa. It sucks you didn't like your experience, maybe things will change, but I seriously doubt it, the mainly configuration through text files will probably always be there, I personally enjoy and hopes it does stay that way. I enjoy the features of portage, and it outweights the occansionaly problem. Even the 5 min sync time isn't that bad. I only sync when I do a system update (about once a week) and then I do my emerge at night. So 5 minutes to get all the updates in line, and then a couple of hours to compile ... that 5 minutes is nothing in the long run. Have you tried Windows Update, same sort of thing, and it take 5 minutes just to tell you what you need.

So in the end, could some things be improved, yeah, but every OS out there has those issues, just find one that provides enough to you as a user and outweighs the downsides of it.

Oh yeah, btw, I had the atheros card in my laptop, use the default init scripts without any problems.
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1. Compiling wastes time. Often, I read post by people saying that you should use that time to do something else in the meanwhile, so it's not wasted. But that doesn't change the matter: you'll have to wait.
I spend a lot of time online, so my system is running anyway. I don't wait for things to finish compiling. It just happens while I'm working on other things. This depends on how you use your system I suppose. Also some people have no problem with a system compiling things while they're out shopping, walking the dog, shagging the wife or whatever.

2. I have often read about improvements given by compiling software directly on the target machine. I don't belive there is any noticeable speed-up. Even if you got 1msec time save every time you run a program, since you probably wasted at least a couple of minutes compiling it, you have to execute it approximatively 120.000 times, then you'll hit the break-even point and you'll start saving a msec every time you run it.
In the end, it may really give you a real small speed increase, but you already wasted it compiling.
Configurability is what makes gentoo stand out for me. Performance may or may not be increased by tweaking things a bit. In my opinion most perceived performance benefits are overestimated and overrated.

3. Portage is horribly broken and terribly slow. It has options (-P) that are known not to work properly and it's marked stable... Being slow it's probably Python's fault. Updating my packages list (the portage tree) alone takes almost 5min on my amd64 X2 with broadband connection. Doh. Aptitude takes real 0m5.774s (from time, sadly I can't post anymore the emerge time...) Download links are down sometimes, some ebuilds are broken, but you can fix them. Not that nice, btw.
Portage is still carrying a lot of legacy around. Basically it wasn't designed to cope with the volume of packages that are now in the tree. Developers are working on improving this situation and the two alternative package managers show much promise.

4. Removing packages completely is a real pain. You may want to try -P (prune) to remove all unrequired packages, but that's broken... This is a hug problem in my opinion, that should be improved soon.
I usually only prune if I run out of diskspace. Packages that are on disk, but not running only take up disk space, which isn't a problem for me as long as disk space is available. I don't think this is a huge problem. And I think anyone should have a pretty good idea of what gets installed on his system anyway. That makes it easier to choose and find things to get rid of if wanted.

5. Packages are marked stable even if the developers themselves admit their software is not to be considered stable. That's odd and very different from Debian's stable.
Can't comment on this. My experience on ppc has been pretty good with the stable tree. Perhaps some more attention to QA with regards to the keywording procedures might be in order, but I'll leave that to the QA team and the other developers to comment upon.

6. Missing or unclear documentation. The official documentation is often outdated or missing, but the unofficial wiki is more up-to-date. Being unofficial, some articles are valuable, others are not. Otherwise you will have to ask on the forums, where the S/N level is very low. Important information is often printed out while compiling. I hate that.
You can log information messages that ebuilds spit out so you can read them later. Official documentation has been quite good in my opinion and a lot of effort goes in to keeping them uptodate and into creating guides for big updates. Can't say I agree with you here. Part of being part of the community is poking us about documentation too if you feel it is outdated or wrong. Please file bugs people.

7. Gentoo continuously bugs you until you update the config files of the programs you update. I love the command line, but continuosly editing configs has never been my greatest dream. I have better things to do, thank you.
The number of packages that come with config files isn't all that large really. And most config files are not modified by me, so I just let those be updated. The few that remain need a bit more attention, but since I know what I want in them that too takes little time. I'd rather have a package manager warn me of updates, than it just trying to merge new and existing config files on its own.

8. Use flags are use-less. I chose mine when I first installed Gentoo, than changed just a couple in 2 years. And I don't belive they improve the performance that much. In fact, my Gentoo system seems exactly as fast as my previsious Debian system and as the new Debian system.
That's a very good use of use flags. Just select the features you want enabled in your applications and that's it. Performance has little to do with it, except in the regard that it allows people to configure packages in such a way that their system use less resources, because they disabled a lot of features. The beauty of use flags is exactly that you get to choose which features you do and which you do not want.

9. Network configuration is strange and never ended working correctly on my atheros card. I ended disabling all gentoo's net config, writing the scripts myself and having them executed by rc-local. That's not the clean way, that's not how I wish it to be done.
Well, I don't have an atheros card, so I don't know about any possible madwifi madness. Configuring my Airport Extreme was extremely easy, including setting up wpa. Compared to other distributions I've used, gentoo's networking system is very versatile, flexible and easy to use.
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PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20093

antarus

1. Compiling wastes time. Often, I read post by people saying that you should use that time to do something else in the meanwhile, so it's not wasted. But that doesn't change the matter: you'll have to wait.

k, Gentoo isn't offering binaries, but I think this is a minor critique in and of itself

2. I have often read about improvements given by compiling software directly on the target machine. I don't belive there is any noticeable speed-up. Even if you got 1msec time save every time you run a program, since you probably wasted at least a couple of minutes compiling it, you have to execute it approximatively 120.000 times, then you'll hit the break-even point and you'll start saving a msec every time you run it.
In the end, it may really give you a real small speed increase, but you already wasted it compiling.

I apologize if you were misled. Compiling from source provides speed increases for *certain types* of applications in *certain circumstances* and really doesn't provide much else (that you can detect). I regret some of the earlier gentoo material that talks about Gentoo being awesomely fast; which really on a dual core amd64 no one is going to notice anyway outside of a few niche cases.

3. Portage is horribly broken and terribly slow. It has options (-P) that are known not to work properly and it's marked stable... Being slow it's probably Python's fault. Updating my packages list (the portage tree) alone takes almost 5min on my amd64 X2 with broadband connection. Doh. Aptitude takes real 0m5.774s (from time, sadly I can't post anymore the emerge time...) Download links are down sometimes, some ebuilds are broken, but you can fix them. Not that nice, btw.

Well if portage wasn't stable you'd have nothing to install packages with. Same with anything else in SYSTEM, stuff has bugs but we rely on it regardless. Being slow is NOT pythons fault. Portage wasn't designed well from the start (I talked to drobbins a few months ago about that specific issue and he said when he wrote it; it was basically a hack for the developer community of ~100 people). So yeah, it has (what I would call major) design flaws. Zac Medico has also done a ton of stuff over the past year to mitigate those and we all hope he will continue to do so.

4. Removing packages completely is a real pain. You may want to try -P (prune) to remove all unrequired packages, but that's broken... This is a hug problem in my opinion, that should be improved soon.

Er, howso? Emerge -C? emerge --depclean?

5. Packages are marked stable even if the developers themselves admit their software is not to be considered stable. That's odd and very different from Debian's stable.

I don't think we market our stable as an equivelant to Debian Stable. If you think we need to make that more clear; perhaps we could do so.

6. Missing or unclear documentation. The official documentation is often outdated or missing, but the unofficial wiki is more up-to-date. Being unofficial, some articles are valuable, others are not. Otherwise you will have to ask on the forums, where the S/N level is very low. Important information is often printed out while compiling. I hate that.

I know our docs team is working on updating many of the guides; but otherwise I agree here (in terms of many of our guides which are old and crusty).

7. Gentoo continuously bugs you until you update the config files of the programs you update. I love the command line, but continuosly editing configs has never been my greatest dream. I have better things to do, thank you.

It bugs you when you run emerge ("you have blar # of files to update"). Otherwise I don't see where this is coming from.

8. Use flags are use-less. I chose mine when I first installed Gentoo, than changed just a couple in 2 years. And I don't belive they improve the performance that much. In fact, my Gentoo system seems exactly as fast as my previsious Debian system and as the new Debian system.

Gentoo isn't about speed; it's about options. I would agree if you thought we had too many; or they were too complicated, or not well documented. But not useless

9. Network configuration is strange and never ended working correctly on my atheros card. I ended disabling all gentoo's net config, writing the scripts myself and having them executed by rc-local. That's not the clean way, that's not how I wish it to be done.

Baselayout is a strange beast; there are days when I think uberlord just loves pissing everyone off with crazy new scripts every three months. Gentoo also has like the most configurable network options known to man

In the end, Gentoo gave me a bad experience. I liked trying it out, but it wasn't surely something that was going to stay.
I'm back to (sweet) Debian.
Good luck.

j.

Enjoy

cokey · Advocate Joined: 23 Apr 2004 Posts: 3355

bLUEbYTE84 · Last edited by bLUEbYTE84 on Thu Nov 30, 2006 11:01 am; edited 1 time in total

OldTango · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 718

Five years ago I had a small home network with 2 to 3 computers all running windows. Wanting to share a single IP address I purchased a linksys router/hub. I always seemed to have problems with it or the connections. A friend of mine told me I should convert one of my old computers into a linux gateway/firewall to service my network. After a bit of time digging and searching I decided to try Mandrake. So I purchased a boxed 8.1 version and installed it. After 3 failed installs I had it up and running. I was always asking my friend for help because I new nothing about linux or how it worked. I kept this box running for 3 years 24/7.

My 1st point. After all this time I still new nothing about linux. Another friend of mine told me about Gentoo. I gritted my teeth and attempted a dual-boot on my workstation, still running windows. I bet I installed Gentoo 15 times before I could acctually boot a kernel. The install that I finally seceeded in getting to boot was from a stage1 hand configured kernel. While I am still a linux newbe and have a lot to learn the fact is Gentoo has taught me how to use and work with linux. If not for Gentoo I would still be using that old Mandrake box and my head still buried in the sand. I have olny one stand alone WinXP box left. Even my childern ( ages 5 - 18 ) use linux daily.

My 2nd point. Gentoo has taught and is still teaching me Linux. Thank you Gentoo.

dansehl · n00b Joined: 26 Jun 2003 Posts: 24

I get turned on by emerging.

- D

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OldTango · l33t Joined: 21 Feb 2004 Posts: 718

gentoo_lan · Posted: Mon Dec 18, 2006 5:08 am Post subject:

See I hate posts that say they want to improve Gentoo and yet decide to leave Gentoo. People in the community should work towards addressing the problems, even if it is only submit an occasional bug report. Giving up on a project doesn't fix it but when it does work the way you want it to you will never see the results. Goodbye my friend and good luck on future endeavors.

stmiller · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 119

I really don't understand these goodbye rants all over this forum. I've only seen this on Gentoo forums, and not with other distros. I guess if you are leaving Fedora, Mandriva, etc. you just leave because you don't really care about it as much. So perhaps Gentoo is like the ex-girlfriend you don't really want to leave? Still love it, and will perhaps come back?

Archangel1 · Veteran Joined: 21 Apr 2004 Posts: 1212 Location: Work

Naib

wah · Posted: Tue Dec 19, 2006 2:00 pm Post subject:

So I guess folks try to plug one of these in per week, eh? :lol:

Compiling the gentoo-way optimizes your code for your hardware - how is that a waste of time?

I personally have NEVER (repeat, NEVER) had an issue with Portage...apt-get, aptitude on the other hand, have broken both times I've used them

Gentoo's STABLE != Debian's STABLE - hence, the difference in projects, name and goals

Documentation - sorry dude, you're WAY off kilter here. Gentoo's docs are AMAZING. Have you ever tried to install *BSD before?

Your concept of USE flags is wrong, and therefore your argument is debased.

Atheros Chipset - works and has always worked like a charm on my laptop - I'm thinking it's a Layer 8 issue for your case.

Bye, Au revoir, Auf Wiedersehen, Arrivederci, Adiós, and Buh Bye!

W.
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W3BMAST3R101 · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 197

have there ever been any benchmarks for comparing i386 to cflags with -march=athlon-xp ect?

just wondering

the w3b

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Corona688 · Veteran Joined: 10 Jan 2004 Posts: 1204