What sets Gentoo apart?

[ddvlad]

Hi, everyone,

first of all, I'm a Gentoo user and I'm sold, so to speak. I wouldn't leave Gentoo for any other distro I know of. Now, a friend's asked me to give him a short (30 minutes maybe) presentation of Gentoo; he wants to install it, but lacks the time, or maybe he needs an initial kick in the rear What's important is that he came to me, not the other way around, so he's probably willing to listen to what I'll say.

A bit about my friend: much like myself, he's not the typical user (or maybe Gentoo's user base is different): we're Computer Science students, so showing him Compiz Fusion probably won't impress him. He'd probably be more interested in technical details, but I'm afraid I won't touch on key points. That's why I'm asking. He's had a few years experience with Linux (as a technical user, not a programmer, I presume), so it won't be a Linux vs. Windows talk.

I was thinking of talking a bit about USE flags and Portage, but other suggestions are much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Vlad
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[poly_poly-man]

(this is more pointed at your friend than you, because you're already sold)..

If you want to try out linux a bit, make sure it's a good environment for you, maybe even do a little development, install a binary distro.

If you want to be plunged headfirst into linux, learning every little intricacy of it, do an LFS install.

If you want a decent, built-from source distro that's relatively easy to maintain, choose gentoo.

What're the benefits of built-from-source distros?

First of all, there is the small performance benefit you get from having packages compiled for your own hardware rather than generic hardware - however, this is a very small benefit.

The biggest thing that sets gentoo apart is customizability. For example, take the kernel. You can either get a kernel that's hideously over-genericized with way too many options selected, or you can configure it yourself and get speed, memory usage and simplicity benefits. Also, consider a desktop environment like KDE... you can individually select not only entire components of kde to compile, but individual features of those components... say you don't want arts... just take out the USE flag (you can also talk about USE flags some more...)

Consider the case of a server... why would you ever want any sound support on a server? with gentoo, just don't compile it in.

Basically, binary distributions can be considered a large buffet that has been placed on your table. Gentoo is a gourmet meal that you yell at a chef to make for you, exactly to your liking (in this metaphor, the ebuilds are like recipe cards, portage is like the chef, the packages are the ingredients, and you can say what ingredients you want in/left out - LFS could be considered a meal you have to cook yourself given all these ingredients).
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[arghnoname]

I would agree with what poly_poly-man said above. Customizability is the biggest difference between Gentoo and the other distributions I have used. This tends to require more work and knowledge about what you want to do and what your computer's hardware is, but if your friend is like me, that's a bonus. If you aren't, maybe it's a negative. I do think it's a fair compromise between LFS and Ubuntu for someone who wants to be familiar, but doesn't want to have to maintain every single installed thing on their system.

The other thing I'd say for people who want to do some programming is I find it very convenient that there are no -devel packages like with other distributions, generally speaking. If I want to grab something or write something and compile it that isn't included in the distribution or that I wrote myself, it's nice not having to install a ton of header packages. This is a really small nit, but having the headers and the documentation on my system (doc use flag) makes it easier to just try something out.

I also like the package availability and prefer portage over the other package systems. This might just be an issue of familiarity (Gentoo was my first distribution), because apt-get works quite well, but there it is.

[StringCheesian]

Computer Science related reasons:
1. He won't have to hunt for foobar-headers, foobar-dev, foobar-libs, etc. Headers and libraries come with everything. There's usually a USE flag for developer documentation too.

2. He can turn on debugging symbols for as much of the system as he cares to, with portage automating what would on other distros be a manual process of recompiling stuff.

3. If he's interested in tested his code with multiple versions of GCC or binutils, Gentoo's gcc-config and multislot features make it easy.

More general stuff:
4. Other distros have optional dependencies. USE flags expose that and more - choices of patches, configure arguments, etc.

5. When installing Gentoo, an existing installation of any distro works as well as an install DVD. All other distros I've seen seem designed to be installed only from their official install DVD. This is great for trying things an official install DVD wouldn't support, like alternative filesystems.

[lightvhawk0]

I haven't had any success setting up software raid on any other system other than Gentoo.

Gentoo has giving me the ultimate Linux experience, in that some things that are hard to do or that are impossible to do, happen pretty easily on Gentoo.

For example if you don't want pam anymore just add -pam in your use flags and emerge -e world.
Another example was when the athlon-64 was introduced, I just recompiled in 64-bit mode and had a fully 64-bit system.

In summary Gentoo lets you do what you want when you want to.
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[yngwin]

http://ben.liveforge.org/why-gentoo

It has a to-the-point list with strengths of Gentoo.
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[rafo]

Look here for yet another inspiring aspect of Gentoo: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/index.xml. There is cutting-edge platform/server/application/etc development work happening at the Gentoo "campus". Even if you don't do development work you can follow what goes on, perhaps participate in testing, and eventually benefit from the work done.

I doubt that there is anything even remotely as impressive to be found at other distro webs! The Gentoo community should be really proud of the Projects page.

[AllenJB]

What sets Gentoo apart?

Lack of announcements about required manual intervention in package upgrades (eg. blocks, the xulrunner USE flag) - inevitably leading to some inventive and downright dangerous "solutions" being recommended by users on the forums.

The uniquely ancient and user-unfriendly website making peoples introduction to Gentoo a fun hunt for the documentation they need - this, among other issues, results in more users frequently attempting to use the awesomely bad graphical installer included on the livecd.

The fun way where even experienced users, like myself, who want to suggest changes get bounced around being told something is the responseability of someone else - even when they don't want to know who's responseable but just if anyone knows where the resources are so they can make the change themselves and submit a patch.

The way in which, when suggesting a solution to a problem, a user will be told of another problem that blocks their solution and that no one cares about fixing said problem (eg. PR's lack of speed in posting announcements requested by other developers)

</{whine,troll,devils-advocate}>

[kernelOfTruth]

[Naib]

USE flags and how the distro doesn't fight you cause you want to add a new package to yr local database
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[Captain Newbie]

Computer Science here. I also appreciate not having to hunt for foo-headers when building against foo.

Portage works very well as a package manager and if I recall correctly the 2.2 release will handle blocking packages (more or less) automatically, replace glsa-check and partially replace revdep-rebuild. 2.2 will also probably require us to sit up and take notice of changes made to Portage. I like the fact that I have to RTFM.

The idea of a self-hosting system is appealing to me. It will run anywhere.

[shickapooka800]

i can't think of a better out-of-the-box compiling environment. this is an obvious choice however because it is a source based distro.


also, options. gentoo has options. be it the thousands of packages (and more with overlays) or the almost 'naked' nature of what-does-what and where it all is allows you to easily get into little tweaks here and there or wild experiments alike. of course, the beauty is that you don't have to do all that either.

next to slackware, gentoo is a distro that I will always use and be a part of. i can't say the same about debian, arch, fedora, or any other distro I have seriously used for long periods of time.

[djdunn]

use flags and how gentoo handles dependencies is why i like it
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[RedSquirrel]

As others have said, it's the full range of customization that you get with Gentoo and the ease with which you can do that customization. Other systems allow you to customize, but Gentoo takes away most of the hassle.

It seems to me that Gentoo does a reasonable job of keeping on top of the security updates. Many other distributions are slow with that sort of thing.

Gentoo makes it easy to install a specific version of a package. You can be as stable or bleeding-edge as you like without having to jump through hoops to make it happen.

I'm surprised your friend needs a little nudging. Most technical people I have known had sufficient curiosity to try things out for themselves without the need for a 30-minute presentation.

[deadeyes]

For me the most important about gentoo is: ability to customize,
rolling release (it is not like, a new version comes out and you have to wait to the next release. As soon as somebody puts it in portage you can use it), best to learn how everything works.

Before gentoo I used debian, ubuntu, fedora, centos, slackware, suse, ...
I never went back to any of them.
So I have to say: try it for half a year, and you'll never want something else (except FreeBSD :p).

[ziggysquatch]