I love Gentoo

gerard27 · Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 1:29 pm Post subject:

@cachOrrO,
I don't see why you need to put anything else but Gentoo on your mother's laptop.
My wife (73) didn't want to use my box,it's in my "den" and has a 24in monitor.
Even though I made her a seperate useraccount she didn't like it.
So we bought a laptop and I put Gentoo on it.
Sure ,we live in the same house,so I don't have to do things over the phone.
But the times she calls for help is for how to copy/paste and things like that.
Just make sure you use stable stuff.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

cach0rr0 · Posted: Tue Jul 28, 2009 3:04 pm Post subject:

thenilan · n00b Joined: 30 Jul 2009 Posts: 1

I have been living with Gentoo for past one year. I also these days recommend my college friends to go with gentoo. When my friends saw gentoo in my home, they all take me one copy of gentoo and take it to their home and tried.

Gentoo - I love you ....

Thanks to Gentoo team and contributors ....
_________________
emo
blues
music videos
indie

Syshalt · n00b Joined: 26 Sep 2003 Posts: 22

I've felt into this hopeless and painful love with Gentoo since 1.4rc1 and just can't leave.
Tried many others - Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, Centos, Debian, you name it. And left all of them - since those distros just *look* like they are gonna free you from "excessive maintainance" you think you're experiencing with Gentoo. But in reality you end up left at the mercy of developers with their decisions (that are poor sometimes) with a relatively poor help from the community. Gentoo community is #1 OS support in the world! All you need is just a search box and you've got competent answers in 2 minutes, that's why I'm still a "n00b" at the board after all those years, LOL

With Gentoo, you can do whatever you want with your system, no limits, you're getting the best help regardless of what direction you choose instead of being told "that's because we have decided that *this* is the best for you". Just amazing.

Sadako · Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 4:50 pm Post subject:

Sadako · Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 4:58 pm Post subject:

doctork · Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 5:56 pm Post subject:

It seems to me that Gentoo is as unstable as the user chooses to make it. Most of the people posting on these forums are, like me, hackers or hacker wannabees that insist on "the latest and greatest" of everything and so jump on everthing as soon as is becomes available. On the other hand, if one builds a system with only stable goodies from Gentoo, there's no reason to believe that the system would be any less stable than Ubuntu, Suse, etc., etc.
--
doc

d2_racing · Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 9:12 pm Post subject:

In fact, I use only the testing branch ~amd64 without any overlay and it's very stable.

ppg · Posted: Fri Aug 21, 2009 10:00 pm Post subject:

d2_racing · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 1:33 am Post subject:

In fact, when something break, it can be fix pretty quick, since a lot of devs are running inside that arch

Sadako · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 1:38 am Post subject:

doctork · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 3:36 am Post subject:

ppg · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 9:15 am Post subject:

But I like sets which comes with the new portage it's really a nice feature. And I am a lazy people, so I don't like to keywords half of my system.
I know if something goes wrong I will have to fix it by myself. Since two years I've been using gentoo the only major bug I had to deal with was e2fs which broke my system, but I heard stable users were impact too.
Running ~arch offers new version quicker than stable, but new bugs too. But we have to test it one day if we want it on "stable branch".

But for my grand-ma' I would not use gentoo because I wouldn't be there to do some emerge world. My grandfather was using Mandriva and now he is enjoying playing majong on ubuntu :wink:

pa4wdh · l33t Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 882

This week I had an other "why i love Gentoo" experience which i'd like to share with you :-)

At work we use RHEL on our servers, and we had to upgrade BIND because of the DoS bug which was found recently.
Instead of just upgrading the application and tools that come along with it, as soon as you install the rpm it also changes the permissions on all configuration files to whatever RH thinks it should be. Here's the catch: We tweaked those permissions so they worked for us, the old values wheren't even saved somewhere.
An other thing was that installing the RPM also automatically restarted the named process. This is really crazy. The server is running production traffic and you want to restart it on a controlled time in a controlled way, not because you upgraded a package. There was no way we could get around this.

This made me love Gentoo even more than I did:
- It wouldn't fiddle with permissions on files i set, or it would ask me before it does
- It won't restart anything without asking me

No way i'll ever install RHEL on my own hardware :-)

_________________
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USE="-war" emerge --newuse @world

My shared code repository: https://code.pa4wdh.nl.eu.org
Music, Free as in Freedom: https://www.jamendo.com

raddaqii · Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2009 11:37 pm Post subject:

I agree with most of the above. After deciding to leave the windows world it took some three months or so to drop dual boot in early 2005. Keeping thunderbird in sync on both was easy enough, if tiresome, but besides leaving the The Bat!-world that was painless. And there was no real need to keep windows anymore after getting used to new apps and 'the gentoo way'. And yes, I'm sorta in love because of the excellent documentation. Not the 'click here, click there'-kind.

I also never understood why any distribution would start or restart a daemon just because you installed it. Or would be enforcing default configs even though you had pre-prepared ones. Even updating GRUB from within Ubuntu sometime in 2006 had screwed up my own symlink structure on a multi-distribution machine to a harsh and insensitive ubuntu-only default. We noticed only on reboot that 6 other distributions were missing. :twisted:

Possibly my fault here, but unnecessary.

One company I used to worked for made quite a transition: Debian -> FreeBSD (which I quite liked) -> Suse -> finally Gentoo when moving to shiny new hardware again. Hasn't changed since.
OTOH there is nothing I can do to make my current employer drop SLES, since thats where you call the hotline to get paid support. My guess is some things do depend on the local admins who might be rather indifferent towards linux flavours but not to 'relaying responsibility'.

Different needs, different tools. Having talked most of my social environment into using open source apps already, when they ask for advice on whether to get the new windows version I shall suggest Gentoo or Ubuntu, as I did when Vista came up. They are ready for it, or linux anyhow. If in doubt I install Ubuntu for them, and have hardly heard complaints.

At home I am sometimes tempted by the shiny Mac OS X on the other desk, but that would deprive me of being able to build the hardware as well as kernels. No way I'm having that anytime soon. ;-)

AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

Why do you state that such and such can't be done with *insert linux distro*, for example in an rpm based system install from source, or unpack the files and move them, or come up with some other creative way to install the desired app. In gentoo its not always as simple as emerge foo, what do you do when foo doesn't exist in portage? You create an ebuild or you manually build and install from source.....same as in rh or debian. One doesn't have to use gentoo to have a system that the inner workings are known. I will admit that unless you have a working knowledge of linux, other distros can in some ways be more difficult to administer. Like simply doing init 2 to install nvidia drivers in ubuntu will not get you where you want to be (gdm still runs) and killing X will simply get you right back to gdm....rediculous behavior for a seasoned gentoo'er. All that said, I once too was in love with all things gentoo....and still am I suppose. It just sounds rediculous to make it seem like you need gentoo to do certain things that can be done in all linux flavors, albeit harder in most. Not trying to rant, its just important to sound educated when you indeed are.....which I know most all of you are, else you just sound like a fanboy.
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This message self destructed a long time ago.

gerard27 · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 8:55 pm Post subject:

I don't understand this thing about maintenance.
Like I wrote earlier,I installed Gentoo on my wife's laptop.
I installed everything she might need and sofar haven't had any reason to do anything.
The hardware doesn't change so no need for new drivers.
Once it does what the person needs you're finished.
It never crashes and if it does just reboot.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 9:14 pm Post subject:

cach0rr0 · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 9:17 pm Post subject:

doctork · Posted: Sun Aug 23, 2009 9:48 pm Post subject:

keet · Guru Joined: 09 Sep 2008 Posts: 571

gerard27 · Posted: Mon Aug 24, 2009 11:08 am Post subject:

@ keet,
Same here.
On my own computer I'm experimenting all the time.
Sometimes with disastrous consequenses.
Gerard.
_________________
To install Gentoo I use sysrescuecd.Based on Gentoo,has firefox to browse Gentoo docs and mc to browse (and edit) files.
The same disk can be used for 32 and 64 bit installs.
You can follow the Handbook verbatim.
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download

AutoBot · l33t Joined: 22 Apr 2002 Posts: 968 Location: Usually Out

raddaqii · Posted: Thu Aug 27, 2009 7:54 pm Post subject:

..and even if it cuts you the community usually knows how to fix. documentation is awesome, and the forums date back to april 2002 .. and there are heaps of threads from started around 2006 still active.. :D