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Kluster
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Joined: 21 Jun 2005
Posts: 29
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 Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:20 pm Post subject: Persuade this Slackware user |
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Well, I'm going to upgrade in a couple of days after having my lovely customized Slackware 10.2 on my main system all this time (yes, I've had no trouble maintaining it for that long - and it feels as slick as the day I installed it). I love Slackware and I seem to have little rationalizations pulling me in both directions to the only distros I would consider using: Gentoo and Slackware.
This time, however, I will follow cleaner package management habits and only use either slackbuilds.com or make my own slackbuilds and add them to slackbuilds.com.
Security is a big issue for me and I feel that I've applied a lot of knowledge to customizing Slackware's security. I had Gentoo on my laptop and after emerging Tor I found that the Gentoo developers (at least in this instance) have a great sense for security defaults too. So that was intriguing. Do you think Gentoo's security development is always handled this well?
On one hand I could have the undeniably easier system to use (*portage*), but on the other Slackware leaves me with the sense of stability and a system of great defaults (so then it is just a matter of configuring binary installations and the kernel). I am not all that familiar with portage, but I had an easy time after looking things up last time I tried it. Maybe you guys can tip me one way or the other - I need a functional system for a long time to come without problems that could compromise uptime or whatever I may be doing. Thanks.
P.S. Oh, and I hate when crap compromises your ability to configure (why I never use gnome or KDE). For example, a few releases of Nvidia drivers ago they started automating the settings configuration process by scanning the model of the monitor. I had to figure out a bunch of crap just to use my old modeline to get my higher 1600x1200@100hz back. |
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BobTheEbuilder
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Joined: 01 Aug 2008
Posts: 9
Location: Highest Branches of the Portage Tree
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| Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 10:27 pm Post subject: |
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Seems like security is one of your main concerns in a system, as is customization and not only the PROMISE of stability but the actual delivery of it. I feel much the same way, and it is a HUGE concern when setting up a system and dealing with package management.
I tried Slackware through BackTrack (not entirely pure) and I liked it. Very stable, very simple (with the right documentation and attitude  ), and an overall good system. Installing from source is a must for me, so that was nice to have. I fiddled with the packaging system, but preferred instead to keep a record of my modifications and what needed to be updated (it was designed to be a temporary system).
You've already hit on the main difference between Slackware and Gentoo: Portage. A few weeks with Portage can change your entire idea of Linux and how it should be handled. The defaults have always worked fine for me, and when they haven't I KNOW I'm not alone. There's always documentation for a fix, or someone with a similar problem that you can get a solution from. It's a great system to learn on, but an even better one to have experience with. As you get to know it more, you'll get to appreciate it more.
I don't know what Desktop Environment you use, if not KDE or GNOME (Enlightenment, Fluxbox variant? Both are great!) but I've run KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, Fluxbox, and XFCE without any real difficulties. If you use something else, I can't give a seal of approval, but its probably worth tinkering with! NVIDIA configs aren't tough, just a lengthy process that involves a lot of time in xorg.conf (but, you're used to Slackware configs, so it probably isn't much! :-p ).
Overall, I think Gentoo is a viable alternative to Slackware, and if you don't need the system right away (and perhaps can wait on file migration) I would say give it two weeks of good use. That's a perfect amount of time to see whether you'll love it or hate it! Hope that helps, good luck on the install, whichever you choose!
-Bob
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Last edited by BobTheEbuilder on Tue Aug 12, 2008 6:52 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Kluster
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Joined: 21 Jun 2005
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:03 am Post subject: |
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Thanks for your reply. I use Fluxbox by the way.
I also will have to install from source a lot - are you saying that Gentoo has been the easy solution for tracking your system modifications after dealing with a lot of source (judging by your name the bob-"TheEbuilder")?
After reading a few months ago I was hearing that there are continually more problems with Gentoo's future due to developers leaving/have conflicting ideas. Is this still the general feeling? I know Slackware doesn't have a limitless future, but I can surely count on the same great decision making of which Patrick Volkerding's record can speak. What do the Gentoo developers see coming? I'm staying as far away from Ubuntu-like anything as possible.
I was also recommended Crux, but I don't think it can possibly match the maturity Gentoo has even with its portage-like system. |
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srunni
Guru
Joined: 26 Dec 2007
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 12:42 am Post subject: |
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I think you'll find that stability is not an issue with Gentoo if you stick to the packages that are marked 'stable'. Of course, you also have the option of using unstable packages, but in most cases, the stable version will suffice (as far as functionality goes).
Also, for increased security, you may want to use the hardened sources.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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zyko
l33t
Joined: 01 Jun 2008
Posts: 620
Location: Munich, Germany
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 2:45 am Post subject: |
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I can confidently say that Gentoo is stable. At least, the stage3 tarball is. Anything you do beyond the basic system that's provided in the tarballs is in your own hands.
"Gentoo" is just a method of managing software from upstream. The tarballs contain a GNU toolchain (Glibc, GCC, binutils) and some other useful packages, like bash, ncurses, wget, bzip2, tar, grep, etc. If the software from upstream is stable, then so is Gentoo. There are some Gentoo-specific packages as well, most famously Portage. However, all of the made-for-Gentoo tools are very unobtrusive.
There are possibilities to screw things up and break Gentoo. For example, re-compiling your whole system with exotic CFLAGs you don't understand might make things unstable. But if you do that, it's not Gentoo's fault
The whole concept of Gentoo is based on the idea that you make or break your own system. Gentoo only gives you some (very useful, very elaborate) tools to facilitate your work.
| Quote: | | On one hand I could have the undeniably easier system to use (*portage*)... |
You'll most likely love Portage. It has some great features that other package managers lack. I personally like the possibility of slotted installations, so I can have more than one version of the same software installed at once and chose between versions whenever I want. There's also the fact that Portage allows us to install any version of a package we want, not just the most recent. Even if older versions are removed from the official Portage tree, they are still archived at sources.gentoo.org.
There are some arguments against Gentoo, too: Compiling everything locally takes time. That can be annoying at times. Most packages build quickly, but there are some bloated apps that take hours (or even days on older hardware): Openoffice, kdelibs, qt, gcc... There are pre-compiled versions in Portage, however, and you're always free to use the pre-built packages from tinderbox.dev.gentoo.org, so there are alternatives.
Gentoo can also cause you to spend significant (!) amounts of time learning and researching about the inner workings of your machine. Don't underestimate that.
| Quote: | | After reading a few months ago I was hearing that there are continually more problems with Gentoo's future due to developers leaving/have conflicting ideas. Is this still the general feeling? |
Gentoo's future is not in jeopardy, as far as we know. There were some problems and disagreements a while back, but things seem to have settled. |
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BobbyJ
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Joined: 25 Feb 2003
Posts: 14
Location: Los Angeles
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 4:58 am Post subject: |
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I'm currently running my most stable Gentoo system ever, and its based on ~x86 and doing a Fiordland Stage1 install.
I don't think you will be disspointed coming to Gentoo from Slack.
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Last edited by BobbyJ on Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:28 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Kluster
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Joined: 21 Jun 2005
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 5:32 am Post subject: |
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| zyko wrote: |
Gentoo can also cause you to spend significant (!) amounts of time learning and researching about the inner workings of your machine. Don't underestimate that. |
Well I have used Gentoo a reasonable amount before, but I don't think Gentoo forces the user to know much more than Slackware. They just make you spend time on different things, and I wouldn't have posted at all if I didn't think they are the two best distros. |
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zyko
l33t
Joined: 01 Jun 2008
Posts: 620
Location: Munich, Germany
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| Posted: Sun Aug 10, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Well I have used Gentoo a reasonable amount before, but I don't think Gentoo forces the user to know much more than Slackware. They just make you spend time on different things, and I wouldn't have posted at all if I didn't think they are the two best distros. |
Gentoo doesn't force you to know more than slackware, but it kinda lures you into reading all those documentations, forums, wikis, blogs, and mailing lists.
Sometimes you find something fascinating that can be done elegantly with Gentoo, like building a system with uclibc instead of glibc and tcc instead of gcc or using your GPU for folding @ home while leaving your CPU idle... and there go at least two weeks of your life that you'll never get back |
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Nephilim666
Tux's lil' helper
Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 148
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| Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 3:30 am Post subject: |
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| Kluster wrote: |
After reading a few months ago I was hearing that there are continually more problems with Gentoo's future due to developers leaving/have conflicting ideas. Is this still the general feeling? I know Slackware doesn't have a limitless future, but I can surely count on the same great decision making of which Patrick Volkerding's record can speak. What do the Gentoo developers see coming? |
I've been using Gentoo for 5 years now and I never *ever* had any stability problem unless I messed with my system.
There have been some bureaucratic failures last year, which have been sorted out really quickly, and there have been discussions about the direction Gentoo is heading to. But overall things run quite smoothly here and there is more than enough potential to keep your ride with Gentoo an very interesting one. The package manager (portage) is under heavy development right now and there are two rivaling alternatives (paludis, pkgcore) on the rise that push the functionality of the package manager.
Gentoo gives you full control over your system and you can adjust everything just as you want. As you can tell, I'd like to suggest to give it a try.  |
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BobTheEbuilder
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Joined: 01 Aug 2008
Posts: 9
Location: Highest Branches of the Portage Tree
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| Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 7:53 pm Post subject: |
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| Kluster wrote: | Thanks for your reply. I use Fluxbox by the way.
I also will have to install from source a lot - are you saying that Gentoo has been the easy solution for tracking your system modifications after dealing with a lot of source (judging by your name the bob-"TheEbuilder")?
After reading a few months ago I was hearing that there are continually more problems with Gentoo's future due to developers leaving/have conflicting ideas. Is this still the general feeling? I know Slackware doesn't have a limitless future, but I can surely count on the same great decision making of which Patrick Volkerding's record can speak. What do the Gentoo developers see coming? I'm staying as far away from Ubuntu-like anything as possible.
I was also recommended Crux, but I don't think it can possibly match the maturity Gentoo has even with its portage-like system. |
Good call with Fluxbox, my WM of choice for security testing. Nice and minimal, with enough functionality to be incredibly efficient.
Concerning the installation from source issue, I'd say that Gentoo has been an easier solution, not necessarily the easiest. Tracking my modifications through Portage hasn't been hard, and if there's ever a very large problem I've been able to go through things in the Gentoolkit (which is always the first thing I install, even before an emerge --sync, it's just helpful to have revdep-rebuild there in case something falls apart!) and fix them.
Your insights with the community and its (perhaps lack of) direction are unfortunately accurate. The general feel for some issues seems to be a demand for features from the users (who want to use Gentoo for everything, but cannot without certain new programs and emerging technologies) and a lack of resources from the developers. The developers cite the fact that any user who feels that projects should be completed faster can become a developer themselves, while users complain that becoming a developer is too difficult of a process for an open source community.
This is a particularly flagrant example of such community woes, with arguments from both sides. I love this community, and I most certainly love Gentoo, but these are hard times. Remaining entirely "free" is an idealistic approach, and a worthy cause, but Gentoo needs to be marketable in order to be efficient. We need money to hire developers, so that the excuse "This isn't my job" is no longer relevant.
My recommendation still stands, but you should know that the choice is not without burdens. I myself am becoming more active in the FreeBSD community, to see where our roots lie, and what exactly Daniel Robbins saw in it worth emulating. Then again, you asked for opinions on Linux and not UNIX, so that remains irrelevant! :-p
I hope my ramblings contain at least some insight, this is a community worth fighting for and it certainly is a distribution worth trying!
-Bob
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Kluster
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Joined: 21 Jun 2005
Posts: 29
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| Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 8:15 pm Post subject: |
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| BobTheEbuilder wrote: |
This |
Ya, I can imagine how much work it is to manage the huge gnome and kde packages. Maybe Gentoo should drop official support for one of them - or both of them. I'm sure my comment won't jive with the majority of users as I assume the majority (over 50%) use either KDE or Gnome. The larger the software the more problems it can cause for long term development. It is an interesting issue. Maybe teams like KDE can work to standardize things to help with the easy integration into different distros - maybe Gentoo devs can threaten to drop it in order to get more support. These big packages have a lot (relatively) of influence on Linux distributions and if they are to be fully supported in the future they kind of have to. This causes the Gentoo/whatever devs to make a predictive decision based on how they think, for example, Linux+KDE will be in the future. If it is either worth discouraging now (a big GUI bleak future) or supporting now (a big GUI dependent future).
Personally, as a biased Fluxbox user (and xfce and others on occasion), I emphasize efficiency. If Fluxbox allows me to work just as quickly (I think more effectively) without the umptillionth line of code and feature, then it is more efficient and should survive as in Darwinian IT. An argument can be made that its beauty is an opinion-based factor, but its beauty and sleekness seems to be derived from its simplicity - and the benefit of simplicity in technology for human interaction is a fact. Companies like Apple have capitalized off of it. |
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srunni
Guru
Joined: 26 Dec 2007
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 6:06 am Post subject: |
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| Kluster wrote: | | Maybe Gentoo should drop official support for one of them |
Yes, they should drop support for GNOME and do something more useful 
_________________
| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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nixnut
Bodhisattva
Joined: 09 Apr 2004
Posts: 10974
Location: the dutch mountains
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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| srunni wrote: | | Kluster wrote: | | Maybe Gentoo should drop official support for one of them |
Yes, they should drop support for GNOME and do something more useful |
Gentoo developers choose what they want to work on. So as long as there's a group of developers that wants to work on gnome then gentoo will have gnome. Same for kde, xfce etc. There is no central authority that tells gentoo developers what they can work on and what they can't work on.
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srunni
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Joined: 26 Dec 2007
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 11:15 pm Post subject: |
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| nixnut wrote: | | srunni wrote: | | Kluster wrote: | | Maybe Gentoo should drop official support for one of them |
Yes, they should drop support for GNOME and do something more useful |
Gentoo developers choose what they want to work on. So as long as there's a group of developers that wants to work on gnome then gentoo will have gnome. Same for kde, xfce etc. There is no central authority that tells gentoo developers what they can work on and what they can't work on. |
I'm jk lol ;/
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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Dugan
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Joined: 10 Aug 2003
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srunni
Guru
Joined: 26 Dec 2007
Posts: 365
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| Posted: Sat Aug 16, 2008 2:53 am Post subject: |
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Well yeah, it's probably the same person.
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| Patrick Ewing wrote: | | if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s a duck, right? So if this duck is not giving you the noise that you want, you’ve got to just punch that duck until it returns what you expect. |
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