Back to Gentoo?

[tpg]

Since this is the Gentoo Chat forum ill share my opinion/experience with you guys!(maybe girlz too?)

Two days ago I got convinced by a Gentoo-hater to try out ArchLinux for some reason. I tried it. But for some reason its not functioning very properly, every time you try to set up X on a system it just screams EPIC FAIL right out of the screen, now, this is my own experience and im not gonna make ArchLinux look very bad or something but it just didnt work very good for me, had this problem in VirtualBox AND on a machine with a nVidia card (It sure is not a just works environment).

Soo.. 2 days later im back to Gentoo again and I just love it, all that customizing that you can do...(ArchLinux installs faster though, binaries huh ).

Its just a bit crappy that you cant do some things on ArchLinux(or maybe I just need some documentation, I dont know).

<3 Gentoo

Tell me your story if you have one

[d2_racing]

I use Gentoo and FreeBSD, so it's almost the same

I use the same xorg.conf on my Gentoo box and on my FreeBSD box.

The only difference that I see is this : Gentoo AMD64 rocks and the FreeBSD AMD64 sucks big time. A lot of packages doesn't compile on FreeBSD AMD64.

And the ATI proprio driver doesn't exist on FreeBSD.

[fangorn]

I am using Debian at work, a Debian based specialized distro for my WRAP router at home, Mythbuntu for my - you might have guessed - Mythtv machine, ...

But on my private laptop I only have two installations of Gentoo, as on my private cruncher.

you can live with other distros, but if I and only I make the descision, the result is clear.

All those Debian machines: once set-up never have to bother again.
Mythbuntu: saved me quite some weekends after the hardware of the pedecessor failed miserably.

For my own machines I always fall back to Gentoo.

And for installation times: I need much longer to setup a Debian, Ubuntu, Suse or whatever machine. (Measured in time I have to sit at the keyboard, not in time until I can use the system). I just partition, untar, configure, copy over working /usr/src/linux, rebuild kernel and use old world file to install all needed applications. Max. 10 minutes until I can do something else. OK, for more complex installations (like mine) I copy over the /etc/portage directory and /etc/make.conf.
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Video Encoding scripts collection | Project page

[rbr28]

You have to work with other distros for some time if you want to really evaluate them. Attempting a single install is not fair. If I had done that with Gentoo I would have dropped it immediately! Many people who complain about the other distros wouldn't think of putting in the time to learn those or to fix things, that they do with Gentoo. I still prefer Gentoo most of the time, but why limit yourself. There's a lot to be learned from other distros too. I'll often look at how other distros decided to do something, or see what software they are using, and incorporate those things into my Gentoo installs. My ranking of distros is something like this, but this is very general since I prefer different ones for different purposes:

Gentoo - Ubuntu - OpenSuse - Debian - Mandriva - Fedora

I leave out the commercial versions of Suse and Redhat even though they are good. I try to avoid the commercial stuff as much as possible. I like the compatibility and support for Fedora, but I have to rank it at the bottom just because it's so slow for a desktop compared to other distributions and usually somewhat behind. I'm not sure where I would put Sabayon, Mint, Mepis, or some of the others I have used, but don't have as much experience with. The LiveCD's like Knoppix, Damn Small, and Puppy are very useful too.

Back to experiences though, although I use other distros a lot, I've never been able to switch from Gentoo on my home machine (I mainly do graphics editing and I run a LAMP installation with Drupal and Gallery2). I kind of got fed up with Gentoo during the whole KDE4 process. Sseems like they took way too long to provide it, offered too many bad alternatives to get it installed, and still can't seem to get it in the stable tree. Most of all, it was horrendous, even on a fast machine, to have to compile 200+ packages to go from 4.0 to 4.1 to 4.2 to 4.22 to 4.23, etc.

I think the average user is MUCH better served with other distros, especially Ubuntu (which is why it's currently the most popular). I prefer Gentoo for the performance difference, security, flexibility, and believe it or not ease of administration long-term. I use a lot of cutting edge applications, often stuff out of cvs. In most cases I can get everything I need from portage to compile these apps, sometimes I make my own updated ebuilds, and if I have to actually just compile the app itself from source (like when I'm taking it from cvs), I always have infinitely fewer problems on Gentoo. It's almost trivial to stay on the cutting edge of kernels with Gentoo. With careful use of use flags I end up with much less junk I don't use on my machines, which means less to maintain in the long run. Basically I'd say that every advantage that Gentoo claims, I've seen again and again after years and years of using it and other distros. With other distros used on my home machine it seems I always run into something they did really strange, making installation of something much more difficult than it should be, and I end up compiling too much out of the package management system, eventually making maintenance (and/or stability) a nightmare.

[fangorn]

[d2_racing]

Once you know how it's working on Gentoo, I mean the manual way, then you can debug yourself when you run others distro.

Like for example the Xorg-Server 1.6 with the new evdev-hal-dbus combo.

[trix]

Personally my experience is likely far from the average, nobody except the truely insane (read: me) would go the lengths I've gone to learn so much linux and install so many different operating systems on a home desktop computer for truely no good reason.

What I mean by that is actually simple, most people that use linux have a decent reason for doing so, they are often IT professionals or use linux at work or something. Not me. I work in fast food and deal Blackjack for a living. I'm a stoner and I'm lazy and I (*GASP*) have a steady girlfriend in a serious relationship. However, I absolutely LOVE Gentoo. I've used an insane amount of distros over the years (I used to love Mandrake until they because Mandriva, i'm not even sure what changed, but I switched distros at that point.) but nothing has helped me grow smarter, more logical, and able to find solutions to my own problems without help, then the multiple times I've pained through a custom Gentoo install. Not to mention, I've always preferred compiling things from source, and alot of the software I use is ONLY available as source code (not going into specifics, it's off the beaten path) The problem I found with binary based distributions, is that they don't make it friendly at all to compile source code, and I've ran into more then a few elitest assholes that have called me stupid or worse for trying to compile source when I could just RPM. People with no real idea what I'm trying to compile or why, that just want to sound superior.

I love Gentoo most of all, for everything about it. The learning process required, the absolutely AMAZING documentatin (Handbook, Docs, Wiki) and I can't bold the word AMAZING enough to accurately show how impressed I constantly am by the depth of info contained within, and the way every step isn't just given, but completely and thoroughly explained with links and tips on where to go to learn it in even MORE detail. Also the community. You guys. Seriously, with what documentation is available, I haven't often needed help from you guys beyond a forum search, but the few times I do, I jump in IRC or make a post and POOF everyone is shoving themselves out the way to try and help me. Now I understand this isn't everyone's experience, but from what I've seen, if your question is truely unique and it's obvious you've spent much effort attempting to locate the answer, everyone can't wait to figure out your problem and help you solve it. That's amazing. You people are fucking brilliant, seriously.

Ok enough ass kissing.

Besides Gentoo, I've used a few other distros and here's my experience for each, in case you give a shit.

Kubuntu: I hate gnome so while I've used kubuntu alot trying it out (for a few months) I don't really know what's different in ubuntu besides KDE vs Gnome. Anyway kubuntu is great, for the inexperienced user. For people new to computers (or just linux) that want linux for whatever reason, but don't want to LEARN linux, kubuntu is awesome. It's a free, easy, full featured, linux desktop. And most of the time it "just works".

OpenSuse: I really liked OpenSuse, I mean I hated the name and almost didn't try it because of the name they gave it, but upon overcoming my judgemental attitude and trying it, I actually found it very compatible and not a bad OS at all. I didn't use it very long though so I can't say much beyond that.

Sabayon: I loved Sabayon. I must confess my initial use of Sabayon was more of a Gentoo Easy Button (yes yes, shoot me now) because I absoluty love portage nearly as much as my wonderful girlfriend (and I hope she never reads this), but beyond the Installation quickness and easiness and the default Beryl/Compiz Fusion it seems a very nice OS in general as well. Eventually when the glitter wore off I went back to Gentoo (for like the 10th time) for the customization and knowing I built my system step by step myself, wrote every config file by hand, etc. Not to mention, while Sabayon really is great and I use it for all my LiveCD/LiveDVD/USBOS needs, I dislike equo for no good reason, and it just feels too much like a half-assed Gentoo (even though i'm sure it's much more in it's own right, and some Sabayon nut is going to burn my house down now) for me to use it exclusive.

There was a few more I wanted to write up but i'll have to delegate that until later, my girl wants Webbs and when the girl wants food, the girl gets food.

[W3BMAST3R101]

[d2_racing]

I don't think that FreeBSD has some global Use Flags.

I know that you can set a couple of cflags but, for the packages, there is a command that you may run before installing a package and it will ask every questions that is needed.

I will double check my notes tomorrow morning.