I'M DONE - 4 YEARS of Gentoo is ENOUGH. (Ed. 2010 - ...)

john.newman · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Oct 2009 Posts: 85

i'm baaaaaack

i forgot how awful binary distributions really are. Plus the pulse audio thing in ubuntu is STILL totally botched. enough of that.

I apolgize for the snide comments in my last post, I was PISSED OFF. So far no compile errors.

I take it back ok?

Hypnos · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 6:19 am Post subject:

I've been using Gentoo since 2002.

I've never seriously considered switching to a binary distro, as the same fundamental problems I encountered prior to 2002 remain: no easy infrastructure to control your toolchain by building from source (important for any developer), and ABI breakage without any too like revdep-rebuild.

Along the way I would get annoyed with some aspects of Gentoo, but they resolved themselves in time and with shifts in my computing philosophy. Two examples:

1) I switched to Paludis when that was ready for all maintenance tasks because it supported repo-level USE flag and keyword wildcards, git repos , and depclean worked. I haven't looked back, though I understand that Portage is now feature equivalent.

2) I switched from GNOME to XFCE, as GNOME had become an unmanageable mess. This is was less Gentoo's fault and more the fault of upstream which has no concept of good architecture. Then, I excised gconf and gstreamer from my XFCE setup -- wonderful.

However, two things still concern me:

1) No community Wiki -- how dysfunctional is the Gentoo leadership that such a simple and valuable task can't get done?

2) It's dangerous to have USE flags in the system set that could prevent revdep-rebuild from working. For example, if you change the "kerberos" USE flag in openssl and re-emerged, that would break wget if that is built with the "ssl" USE flag. If you then try revdep-rebuild, you wouldn't be able to download the source tarballs. (Of course, any competent Gentoo user could boot with rescue CD/USB stick and chroot ...)
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XQYZ · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 231 Location: Europe

Hypnos · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 4:06 pm Post subject:

disi · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 4:09 pm Post subject:

We should update the topic to: "5 years Gentoo is enough!" :idea:

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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 5:04 pm Post subject:

john.newman,

Welcome back, we knew you would come, it was just a question of when.
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ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

ezfranca · n00b Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 9 Location: Brazil

This thread will never die [2]

I am a quiet 7 years user of gentoo and I just can use any other distro.

I tried to change, but I just cant.

I am happy with it. It is like a marriage: You can have bad times, leave the house for some days, but at the end of the week, you miss it and come back again, being happy until the next argue

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FizzyWidget · Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 8:52 pm Post subject:

if i keep getting all these issues with gentoo i may as well quit it, its a great distro, but so many packages have been messed up lately, and i've just been hit with the system not booting issue on a fresh install!!!!!
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john.newman · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 17 Oct 2009 Posts: 85

things have been perfect here. NO broken packages.

A few months ago, i have no idea why i was getting so many problems. It was almost as if I had ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" in my make.conf or something (I did not :lol:

) .. This time around I've been using package.use most of the time instead of setting the flag globally. Seems to be a little more sensible. The more I think about it, the more I think I had something set wrong. It was smooth like this until one day - emerge just failed nearly everytime. Now i clean out, come back to the same portage snapshot, and nothing fails. :?:

I have no intention of leaving again, no where better to go..

Chiitoo · Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 3:03 am Post subject:

insilica · n00b Joined: 13 May 2011 Posts: 2

Gentoo is By far, the best distribution I ever used...

I've been on Debian & Debian flavoured distributions, RedHat flavoured (centos/fedora), SUSE, Arch for a little while and freebsd. Maybe this is premature but having used gentoo for 1month I don't think I want to try anything else, running very smoothly on a now almost 6 year old core2. But I have to say for my headless server I prefer freebsd.

It took me 4 days to get the system up, thats a complete workstation, but I had tremendous feeling of satisfaction when it was done and felt a little giddy

The one thing I find lets gentoo down is the documentation, I found myself referring to Arch documentation sometimes. Once I'm settled into gentoo I will try to contribute some updates to the manual . But if the boat sinks I'm jumping back into Arch!

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/linux-world-map.html

I like the fact that now I reside in "The forbidden land of Gentoo", far north

FizzyWidget · Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 11:20 am Post subject:

I agree it is the best i have used, and i have gone through a few of them :p

It's just the fact that lately whether i use stable or arch every other time i have emerge --sync and then updated packages something crops up, its just annoying.

The main reason it's pissed me off is i had my laptop running sweet, but then the hard drive died, so i had to replace it, hence a full re-install (which is never nice, or short

), and now it seems i am hitting the /oprnrc/sysinit/init issue that a lot of other people are having, maybe it was my time to hit an issue.

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I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

Randy Andy · Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 4:18 pm Post subject:

Hi all.
Before i come to Gentoo in the year 2007, i tried about 30 different distros (mostly binarys), before i got an idea how much more freedom, power and control you can get,
if you're using the source to build your own packages from.

In gentoo, i found the source based distro, which can do this more comfortable with maximum of control, than any other distro i've ever seen.
That's why i can't imagine to change this distro anytime.

Some guys in this thread asked how old your system is, so i get interested to look for, on the pc im just working on, which the youngest of my gentoo boxes.

A little history:

FizzyWidget · Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 4:20 pm Post subject:

after sorting out the boot issue, gentoo has a repreive

My list is probably the typical type

Redhat
Mandriva
slackware
Gentoo
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I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

stfish · n00b Joined: 09 Jun 2011 Posts: 7

I have come back to Gentoo after a year or so away. I may not stay. I do not have time to untangle obtuse and outdated documentation. Packages are not being maintained --- a badly defective stage3 tarball gets released and three weeks later is not fixed?? Seriously???!

I love the flexibility and I think portage is the best package manager out there, but I have doubts about the current state of Gentoo affairs.
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davidm · Guru Joined: 26 Apr 2009 Posts: 557 Location: US

Sprotte · Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2011 12:23 am Post subject:

dol-sen · Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2011 12:41 am Post subject:

Yes, there is a graphical installer. It is a port of the anaconda installer that was done this past summer as one of the GSOC projects. It is not in the mainstream livedvd yet, but is available.

Kernel config is not that difficult. Once you have a config, when you upgrade, copy your config to the new sources. Then run "make oldconfig" which updates the config asking you about any new config options not in the previous one, deletes any not used anymore. Also one of the devs has just made an "eclean-kernel" app to help clean out old kernels and sources.

Another thing is that there have been a number of advances in portage/ebuilds that are making things usually upgrade even smoother, including auto-unmasking and some auto-use capability as well.
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Mac Tzu · Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2011 6:20 am Post subject:

ppurka · Advocate Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 3256

Sprotte · Posted: Tue Nov 01, 2011 5:59 pm Post subject:

Right, I know about make oldconfig, I probably just got burned a little when too many of the config options changed and I didn't know what the heck half of them did, and I also remember reading that oldconfig would not work anymore. Trying to make my machine run as a WLAN access point might have contributed to my frustration, that was a horrible experience. The kernel seeds look like a good idea, though.

I would still prefer not having to deal with make *config at all, tbh I don't care if my kernel image is 1 MB or 10 MB. I'm not interested in ricing.

cfg-update - IIRC I was using etc-update. Maybe there were some improvements on that front, I'll try cfg-update next time I install Gentoo. I just thought it was unnecessary to make me manually update the network configuration file every time despite absolutely no changes to my settings. Basically I thought this type of tool could be a little more intelligent.

The Genaconda installer looks like a great idea, it would be a HUGE help and motivation for me (and maybe other people like me) if there was an ISO image with it. It just helps you get over that initial blank screen. This might just get me to install Gentoo again - in a VM, that is.

Mac Tzu · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2011 6:34 am Post subject:

wim-x · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2011 7:50 am Post subject:

Hypnos · Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2011 2:33 pm Post subject: