What distribution will *YOU* switch to? (part II)

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

If nvidia would release a 64bit, CUDA enabled freebsd driver, I would switch to freebsd. having said that, now that I am back and using gentoo (after my 2 years of slamd64 <-- love it), i'll be around for a while. I like the familiar structure and ease of administration that gentoo offers. if you don't believe that last sentance, know that I have used gentoo for a while.
Also, I am more familiar with how a gentoo system works than anyother distro or OS. why? because of the countless times I booted up a minimal install cd and tried to install my first few gentoo systems. I would claim that any person who performs a few feature filled gentoo installs should recieve some sort of linux certification. the same can certainly NOT be said for ubuntu/fedora/etc... users in my opinion.
despite the issues some people seem to have (sorry... I just can't understand some of the support questions seen in other forums... my answer to half of them would be "start all over again, you messed up bad..."), gentoo has a maturity and polish about it that rivals any of the other mainstream, modern distros.
sure its had developer fallouts, bad press, and other bad mouting in the past, but I cannot think of a more well put together distro.

having said that, there is one thing i have to mention. I used to use the gentoo docs anytime i needed to do something (on other distros and even other OS's!) but I have to admit, there are articles that are showing there age. I know for a fact that this time around, I would have run into serious problems if I had followed some docs to the letter.

xokaido · n00b Joined: 07 Oct 2008 Posts: 1

There was only one Distribution I would switch from Slackware - Gentoo, I have done that... The only distribution now is Slackware where I would switch back if there wuld be some problems with Gentoo...

By the way, it seems very, very powerful distribution... After thee days of installation procedure, help of many people in irc.freenode.net and especially freqnasty (a friend of mine, user of this forum, a Gentoo user too and the person who suggested to switch) I have switched, I have installed Gentoo and now I'm writing this post from it... It's cool..

P.S. freqnasty, if you read this topic THANKS A LOT PAL...

Hello, all Gentoo users!...

durian · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2003 Posts: 312 Location: Margretetorp

jUmB0 · Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 12:39 am Post subject:

since im stuck in a sandstorm with nothing else to do im throwing my 2 cents on a dead topic

the past 5 years ive had with gentoo have been in a very nerdy fashion just like parenthood

my first gentoo install is still going strong, its a headless p3 1ghz resting quietly under a desk in a basement over 1000 miles away from me right now. i still ssh in and give it love as much as possible. im on my 2nd gentoo laptop (1st funtoo laptop if you want to be technical) and couldnt be happier with it. I would be in tears over my desktop sitting in storage without it.

i came to gentoo from freebsd and will never look back. i put close to a decade into freebsd and thought it was a gift from lord zeus himself. i lol'ed at linux users are their silly distros like slackware and debian, they didnt even know how delicious ports was. i heard about gentoo a fellow freebsd aficionado who derided gentoo saying it was so current it broke itself with untested and current as of that minute software. after years of stable i had to do it. trying my first completely ~ build on gentoo was just like trying crack. it was great, so great that i set myself on fire ran through the streets. that was all i needed to get hooked, just like crack.

in the aftermath of gentoo's gleeful toddler years, i have given ubuntu and foresight a whirl, while they make good toys for young girls and buys i felt like i was getting hit in the face with a football bat. the choose your own adventure style is the only way for me. individuals leaving gentoo because they dont like constant updates and long compile times should ask themselves why are they updating constantly. how someone could be so blind they consider the most compelling feature available to any form of unix a negative is beyond me. there is a reason people put portage on freebsd systems. dealing with the bastard offsprings of unix is just like farming, you're going to reap just what you sow. if your crops didnt come in and now your family might not make it through the winter, look in the mirror to see who actually failed little susie may.

While some would see gentoo as falling apart as of late, its really just in those awkward early teenage years where only sick self loathing individuals find it attractive. im that guy with an astrovan full of candy and icecream parked outside the linux middle school. you may think its wrong but i know what i like.

honestly tho; stop crying, take a few breaths, and relax. be mellow and enjoy the ride. while you are out there take the time to stop and smell the flowers, they smell good these days. really damn good.

d2_racing · Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 2:11 am Post subject:

At work I use a Gentoo testing for my laptop and I have a stable AMD64 for my server.

But, last week, my boss asked that I install FreeBSD 7.2 Release because he would like that I become also an BSD administrator too.

So nice

energyman76b · Advocate Joined: 26 Mar 2003 Posts: 2048 Location: Germany

none

I have no reason to switch.
_________________
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males

I identify as a dirty penismensch.

salmonix · Guru Joined: 16 Jul 2006 Posts: 410

If a desktop with all the gadgets and libraries - gtk, qt for k3b, Gome and all -, then Arch. Minor tweaking, fast installation, etc.etc.
And I really do not feel much loss in performance (if any at all). More: bootprocess is fast, pacman is also fast and flexible etc., and yes, it is easy to check what options were used when an Arch package was created. I run Arch and Gentoo on 2Ghz amd64 and see no much difference. Probably on an even stronger box the difference is more eliminated. There are broken packages - lately Conky is crying -, but I have not experienced a smooth Gentoo install. Managing this or that is a part of the picture and not hammering down.
So, if make.conf USE section goes long, Arch. If not, Gentoo.

On my old PIII box and my old G4 laptop (RIP) I used Gentoo: slimmed to the needs, no bloat, setting use flags in /etc/portage/. Took time to emerge all, but I needed a slim and tailored, responsive system.

Only Firefox can not be tailored. The elephant...
_________________
Quis custodiet ipsos, custodes?

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 9:39 pm Post subject:

GoofballJM1

Although I support Gentoo and it will always be a great distribution in my mind, I have to admit I have left for Ubuntu as well as of this past week.

5 1/2 years ago, I was thrilled to run into Gentoo. I spend the previous 18 months (my first foray into GNU/Linux prior to Gentoo) on Mandrake and Red Hat 9, spending an inordinate amount of time hunting for RPM dependencies, and then after an unsuccessful search, download the source and compile myself, and then dealing with extremely slow performance (especially on Mandrake!). It would take hours to install a single application in some cases. This drove me crazy. When I heard of portage and how it did all of that for me, and compile the O/S from source, it intrigued me. I was running on old hardware, and compiling source code could help improve my performance over Mandrake. I also thought about Debian at the time, but it was always behind other distros because of it's slow release of stable kernels and applications (they were still running the 2.4 kernel when 90% of other distros were supporting 2.6 for over a year at the time).

I jumped in. I spent the next 5 years running Gentoo. It taught me everything I know about Linux. Because of it's intense hands on approach, I felt a sense of accomplishment when I would compile a Stage 1 install on my server and then learn the intricacies of Linux, which wasn't even possible on other Linux variants. I used Gentoo as a system administrator at a previous job 4 years ago on two servers. I consolidated the environment down to two Win2003 servers and two linux servers from about 8 Windows machines in a matter of months, and saved that little company thousands on licensing and maintenance costs. For production environments, I could have a stage 3 up and running in less than a day. I loaded it on an old laptop (P2 233) and ran an X environment and apps using only 16 MB of RAM. It was great for testing networks at my job. Knowing Gentoo helped me tremendously when I worked on other distributions. I had seen so many compile errors and problems with installs on systems, I wasn't the least bit intimidated by unfamiliar Linux territory.

But for those very reasons, I got tired of it. I finally had the opportunity to replace my Gentoo Server, whose O/S install was older than my 2 children and hadn't needed a reboot in a year. I eagerly loaded Gentoo on my new server, and spent the better part of a week installing apps, copying configurations over, etc. etc. I installed X on the server and got it about 80% ready. The problem was it took so much time! I was 3 weeks before I could start moving stuff over (about 12 man hours in front of a console). Then I ran updates on the server to keep it current like I had done for years, and it would break something each time. Then I would have to run revdep-rebuild and play with that until errors went away. Stuff started breaking every time I ran an update on a specific app (and waiting for the code to compile was getting old). I sincerely was tired of it. I understood the value, but it was wasting my evenings. So I said, I could either keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results, or I could change entirely.

So I did. I downloaded a Ubuntu Server Edition ISO and in about 90 minutes of work, I was able to retire my old server. The machine runs cleanly, installs and setups are quick and painless, and the documentation is very straight forward for Ubuntu (Gentoo documentation is awesome, don't get me wrong).

If people are looking to get into GNU/Linux and understand the inner workings, there isn't a better distro out there than Gentoo. I was never afraid of the command line after Gentoo. It helped a guy that never officially graduated from college get a decent job in IT because I did so many things with this distribution.

More or less I feel like I've graduated from the hours spent tweaking my xorg.conf to get my video card working or exporting USE flags to /etc/portage/ so I can get the right installation of PHP installed on my Apache instance. It's fun to do, but I have bigger fish to fry these days. Ubuntu is a better fit for me now, but I will always be loyal to Gentoo.

Thanks Gentoo for all the great memories and for teaching me Linux. The skills and financial benefits I have reaped have been tremendous to myself and my family.
_________________
"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds." - Albert Einstein

audiodef · Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 10:49 pm Post subject:

Good post. I've had thoughts lately about using Ubuntu on some of my machines, because while I love Gentoo, I just want to get stuff set up and running so I can do other things now. I'm not quite there yet, though.

Either way, some of my machines will always have Gentoo. I guess it boils down to the right tool for the job.
_________________
decibel Linux: https://decibellinux.org
Github: https://github.com/Gentoo-Music-and-Audio-Technology
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/decibellinux
Discord: https://discord.gg/73XV24dNPN

jonnevers · Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 10:55 pm Post subject:

but ubuntu... there are better choices.

shazeal · Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:21 pm Post subject:

Archlinux for one. Any binary distro other than Arch just winds me up, I hate not having an easy way to customize packages.

platojones · Posted: Mon Jul 06, 2009 11:29 pm Post subject:

Enjoyed reading the post. Ah well...you don't know it yet, but you'll be back

My main desktop machines have been Gentoo for the past 7 years...I just can't see myself letting go of it. It's a part of my life.

But, I recently got a netbook (ASUS EEEPC 1000HE) and installed Ubuntu (actually Eeebuntu...a netbook distribution of Ubuntu) because I just didn't want to compile packages on that low powered netbook. I was surprised at how smooth Ubuntu runs on that little netbook and the huge, up-to-date package repository it has. I like it...

...But, when I had to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, I had to reinstall. They are working on a painless upgrade path, but that was a big bummer. I've never had to re-install Gentoo except when I replaced my desktop machines.

Anyway, I'm still loving Gentoo, but not afraid to use other distros either under certain circumstances.

Naib · Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 8:00 am Post subject:

hoacker · Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 10:20 am Post subject:

I did it the other way. I left ubuntu for gentoo, because I was fed up with broken release updates and inflexibility. Well, go ahead and make your experiences with ubuntu. If ubuntu suits you better than gentoo, fine then, but maybe we will read on of those "I'm back to gentoo" posts from you in the future...

monsm · Guru Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 467 Location: London, UK

audiodef · Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 12:44 pm Post subject:

All the "but you'll be back" lines ring true for me! I've "left" Gentoo before, only to be back and better than ever. That's why I might gripe, but I know I'm not actually going to switch to another distro. Played that game of ping-pong too many times and now I'm happy to just sit on this side of the fence.

_________________
decibel Linux: https://decibellinux.org
Github: https://github.com/Gentoo-Music-and-Audio-Technology
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/decibellinux
Discord: https://discord.gg/73XV24dNPN

d2_racing · Posted: Tue Jul 07, 2009 5:01 pm Post subject:

For a quick installation distro I use Ubuntu too.

It's simple and fast, but if you want to play with your box, then Gentoo or FreeBSD is a better choice.

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

I can understand how you got there. As it is at the moment i'm getting a little tired of instability in stable packages and sometimes dog-old stable versions.

I'm starting to think I may go to T2, *BSD or Debian. I doubt i'll go to Ubuntu as i've just spent most of today trying to get it on an old Dell Inspiron. 9.04 kernel panicked everytime it loaded X even with all the updates and Fedora 11 livecd failed to fully boot. Think it may be due to the ATI R300.

I have plans on using Gentoo but with a special versioning system. Just ideas atm as I have other things to do.

mikegpitt · Advocate Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 3224

Ubuntu is a fine distro and has done many great things for Linux as a whole. In fact, my mom's, dad's, and sister's machines have been running some variant of Ubuntu for the last couple of years, since it was too difficult to keep everyone's Gentoo machines up to date while living a state away.

I still use Gentoo on all my personal machines (desktops/laptops/servers). I just love the customization too much!

I did get a bit frustrated last week when I ran an `emerge -DupN world` after not doing so in a few months and saw a ton of QT blockers, but that's life. I got things working swiftly anyway

GoofballJM1,
You have a great point about using Gentoo to learn Linux inside and out. I don't think I would be as proficient in Linux as I am today if I stuck with RedHat (which I switched for Gentoo sometime in 2003).

djdunn · l33t Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 810

i just copied my etc copied world file copied my make.conf did a stage 3 install. emerge -e system && emerge -e world

though from what you're saying something breaking with every update is extremely rare and is a symptom of a bigger problem.
_________________
“Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the Universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, gaiety and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good and just and beautiful.”

― Plato

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:41 am Post subject:

I'm running Gentoo ~amd64 at work, I'm actually paid to test and run a Linux box... so I sync my box everyday

dreadlorde · Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 2:42 am Post subject:

No one cares about why/when/how you stopped using Gentoo. There's already too many threads about this crap.
_________________
Ludwig von Mises Institute

Quote:

I am not to be a shepherd, I am not to be a grave-digger. No longer will I speak to the people; for the last time I have spoken to the dead.

audiodef · Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:00 am Post subject:

Smooth.

tgR10 · Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2009 3:23 am Post subject:

im using gentoo for almost 2 years, and didn't notice what you did about that update breakage, for me that maybe happend twice or triple so far ...
the main thing about update in gentoo is to read info from emerge, if it says to reemerge somthing you should do it :) and that's how i did, i even did manage to update to xorg 1.5(now 1.6) without any problems which i was afraid after reading so many posts about ppl got problems ... had none - strange duno how i did it,all i could think of is that most of that stuff gentoo did it for me

i left debian for gentoo and i'll never go back there, neither any debian based distro ... nor to binary distro ... it's not just flexible enought for me, i don't need all that shit, especialy those i'm not using, but in those distros you have to have them ... which i can get rid of with use flags and i just love it
/edit 'that one freak'd me out when i read it, but i hope you got my point'

duno on what pc you did that server instalation, and why do you need X on a server ...
once i checked my time in instaling gentoo, i needed 47 minutes with a watch in my hand, for first time installing gentoo on that machine, it was p4 2.66 1gb ram(damn my amd64 3500+ 2,2ghz works much much faster), more than half time i spend configuring/compiling kernel and taht was it in less than 50 mins i boot up my gentoo box
basic stage3 setup + cron/syslog/dhcp/kernell/nfs/home network/internet
and i got to add i'm not a linux master or anythin, i'm just a end user who like when everythin is working :) and i do sync on all my gentoo machine everyday, and sometimes even update it everyday sometimes once a month depend on machine and it's up to may lazynes

after a time you'll see what pice of crap ubuntu is, there is just so many things you don't need inside after "first run" :)

but everybody got free will right ? so go ahead :) feel happy with your decision, i just hope you come back to us faster than you left :P
_________________
"bo kto ma racje ? ten kto z bliska zobaczy"
"moge nie wiedziec,wchlaniam niewiedze z malych torebek"
http://i12.tinypic.com/4pow0mu.png
http://userbar.tgr.debil.eu/userbar.jpg