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

[luismw]

EDIT: Split from the orignal I'M DONE - 4 YEARS of Gentoo is ENOUGH. (Ed. 2006 - 2009) which had become too large. --pjp


I just wanted to add my experience to this really long thread because I think that maybe the view of a newcomer could be refreshing. I don't know who "daniel" is, how was Gentoo like in the old times, who the devs are or what they do. But here's what I do know:

I've been using Ubuntu for the last two years, from Hardy (8.04) up until Karmic (9.10). I think it's safe to say that Ubuntu is currently the distro with the highest number of users and -quite possibly- maintainers, and one would expect first-rate support and quality of releases. I mainly use my PC for a bit of office work and for gaming. In my particular case (I use a netbook), I expect two things from my OS: a) keep my hard drive free of crap, b) all SW has to deliver the highest performance. Up until now, Ubuntu fulfilled these expectations, with a number of catches:

I found that it was impossible to simply upgrade to the next release (I have a tiny hard drive), so if I wanted to keep with up-to-date software, I needed to perform a complete reinstall every six months. That's catch number one.

Catch number two: the things that work in previous releases don't work in the next one. So after a full reinstall I had to first spend a couple of hours to remove the crap that Ubuntu decided that should come in a new install and then some days trying to get everything to the state I had before. To be fair, hardware support has been improving in every release (that's mostly due to the kernel, but still).

With Karmic came the last straw: no matter how hard I tried, there was no way to remove a dependency on pulseaudio that made an essential emulator completely non-functional, the gaming apps that did work performed poorly and a number of other issues. Also, Ubuntu is starting to move from apt-get to the "Ubuntu Software Center" (or Store, whatever) which promises to take even more control over what is installed on your system.

That's how I decided to install Gentoo on a SD card, just to see how it would go. I installed from the minimal CD (I used unetbootin to move it to a USB stick first) and the latest stage3, the install process was a lot simpler than I expected, and the best part is that I know that I will only have to do this once, not every six months. From the start I enjoyed the sense of really being in control of the OS, and not the other way around. I could choose the dependencies, the optimization flags for the binaries... Well you know that already.

More than a week after this "experiment" I discovered that I haven't booted Ubuntu for anything at all. Everything works better than ever and that's it. So thank you and please keep this distribution alive, because judging by the way some other distros are doing, you're bound to get a lot of new users soon.

[Mike Hunt]

Yep, after the initial rather steep learning curve, and some experience, it becomes apparent that Gentoo - with frequent world updates, is the by far the easiest GNU/Linux to maintain.

[EzInKy]

[Mike Hunt]

[EzInKy]

[Mike Hunt]

[d2_racing]

In fact, I update my box at least 3 times a week and I didn't have any problem since I started this way to update my box.

[kernelOfTruth]

[Karsten from Berlin]

Well, I'm going to update my systems around once in 2-3 weeks. The "old" one is running since approx. 2006. The "new" one since 03/2008.



The good thing on Gentoo is the continuous updates, that make a "huge" upgrade up to a new version obsolete.



The bad thing is/are, that you should update regulary (don't wait > half year) _and_ that one or two times a year some complicated update appears that hits you in a moment where you don't have time to spend hours again in front of your screen because some other things were planed with your wife and children. The last catastrophy for me for example was the upgrade to KDE 4. Took me some hours to get rid of blockers.

<edit some minutes later>
Just to come back to the main subject of this thread - I'm also thinking of leaving Gentoo.

Why? - Well, if you take a look at my account you will see that I'm using Gentoo since 2004. One of the first things when starting with Gentoo was to get an account for asking questions. Later, I was the one helping. It was a nice time. I definetely learnt so much about Linux - I'm sure that this learning gave me the chance to get into the company and the job I currently have. So it was really worth to learn all the things to use it later in professional IT.

But since about 2 years I'm having decreasingly fun with using Gentoo. Once or twice a year really catastrophies are happening, that cost my nervs, my lifetime and are not funny if your wife is a freelancer and needs her IT environment (and nothing is working anymore because... ). Additionally I'm working in IT business (it's much worse: With Novell SuSE SLES - aaaarg), so I don't want to spent a lot of time again with these IT things at home but be a daddy for my two children.

So for this, I thing Gentoo is definetely the wrong distribution. Maybe I will take a deeper look in the Ubuntu series, in my case it would be Kubuntu. Well, we'll see. Within the next months, my wife needs new machines again because the old ones are... old . I'm pretty sure I will give Kubuntu a try. "apt-get" will suit my needs better than the portage system and manuall configuration.

I'm not saying that Gentoo is bad. But for me, with an age of 35, the time of family got more important over the years than the time of trying crazy things with Gentoo (or just doing things with Gentoo that other distros do automatically during installation).

Maybe I'm coming back - never say never. I also read some posts here of people that arrived here from Ubuntu because it did not what it should.

But I swear - I will definetely NOT (= NEVER EVER) use Windows as main OS!
<edit>
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Hell: The police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it's organized by the Italians.

[d2_racing]

[eerok]

[d2_racing]

In fact, Arch seems to be pretty good.

I will test Sabayon when I find the time at work too.

[kernelOfTruth]

[d2_racing]

In fact, I use Gentoo at home and at work

My hobby became my work in 2008

[donjames]

Hi petrjanda,

I have been using Gentoo since December of 2005 and am looking for something better.

I was using FreeBSD before.

Tell me about your experience with Dragonfly BSD.

email: donaldbjames@suddenlinkmail.com

Sincerely,

Don James
Henderson, Texas USA

[donjames]

Hi randy_waterhouse,

I agree with you as regards gentoo.

It really has gotten to be a pain in the butt.

I have been running servers on gentoo since December 2005. I switched from FreeBSD to Gentoo, because gentoo would do some things that I couldn't do with FreeBSD.

I run web servers, nameservers, radius servers and ftp servers on gentoo. It has performed flawlessly for the past 5 years. But, gentoo is getting to be more of a pain to install and maintain. It seems to get worse and worse.

I just had a really bad experience trying to get ALSA to work on gentoo. After 4 days, I have finally given up.

I was trying to route all of the sound to the usb headset and gentoo fought me all the way. Sometimes the sound would go to the usb headset and sometimes it would go to the built-in speakers on my laptop.

One of the contributors to this topic mentioned Dragonfly BSD. I think I will try it and see what I can do.

Sincerely,

Don James

[yngwin]

[donjames]

]Hi yngwin,

I finally got alsa to work -- sort of.

Here's what I am trying to do:

I am trying to get alsa to talk to XLite, which is a softphone by counterpath. It is used to talk to the Public Service Telephone Network (PSTN).

I have a usb headset and I am trying to route all of the sound to the usb headset.

When I enable all of the alsa sound in the kernel, then some of the sound goes to the usb headset and some of it goes to the built-in speakers on my laptop. When I type "speaker-test" on the command line, the sound goes to the usb headset. When I play a CD with KsCD, the sound goes to the built-in speakers. When I try to use XLite, the sound goes to the built-in speakers.

So, here's what I did. I disabled all of the alsa sound except for the usb sound. Unplugged the usb headset. I recompiled the kernel and rebooted the computer. Now all of the sound goes to the usb headset, except for XLite. There is no sound to XLite. At this point, I think the problem is with XLite, not with alsa. Also, the usb headset is the only audio device, so it has to be the default device. XLite does work with the oss, but I would just as soon not use it. Some people say to enable the oss emulation in the kernel and others say not to. Not sure what to do here.

At this point, I think what we need is documentation SPECIFIC to gentoo. I am still not sure how
/etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf and /root/.asoundrc work. I know that there must be a way to route all of the default sound to one device. Lots of examples would be very helpful.

I tried looking at the Wiki for alsa, but it was not detailed enough for gentoo.

I have spent the last 4 days searching the documentation for more specific documentation on alsa as implemented on gentoo.

There are lots of things that I really like about gentoo. I have been running servers on gentoo since December 2005 and I can tell you that gentoo is rock-solid reliable. I have tried other flavors of Linux and they are vastly inferior to gentoo. My first install of gentoo was a stage 1 install. It took about 3 days.

So, what I need from the developers is: BETTER DOCUMENTATION.

I do appreciate the developers. I know it is a lot of hard work. I did assembly language programming on the IBM-PC in 1984. It was running the Intel 8088 chip. So, I have some idea of how difficult and frustrating programming can be. Especially systems programming.

My email: donaldbjames@suddenlinkmail.com.

Thanks for listening,

Don James
Henderson, Texas USA

[yngwin]

Your problem is that the ALSA documentation is lacking. That is not a Gentoo specific problem. You would have the exact same problem on other distros.
_________________
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

[donjames]

ALSA documentation that is SPECIFIC to gentoo.

[desultory]

[aidanjt]

[yngwin]

Screaming (or the typographic equivalent) is an extremely effective way to make any developer not want to help you. I'd be happy to see you leave Gentoo. I don't like to waste my time on people who don't appreciate our efforts.
_________________
"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." - Abraham Lincoln
Free Culture | Defective by Design | EFF

[dE_logics]

Gentoo fixed my broken graphs drivers (ATI)...I don't know how, but it did. I find it pretty fast (specially under load and full memory), stable and all.


To master a distro, and to be on the safe side, it has to be Gentoo. It's always the first distribution to be ready for any new (and unusual) processor; while other binary distributions will have to wait till the whole repository is recompiled for the processor and might result in many other consequences also.

[electricallew]

I have used Gentoo for many years. This is my first post. I was inspired by some replies in this thread to pitch in.
I too "left" Gentoo for a bit. Kind of looking for something better. Not because Gentoo is the fault, but because I am lazy.
I am using Gentoo now, because I really don't know enough to get the system I want from other distros. Thank you to all who have made Gentoo what it is today.