Issues driving migration away from Gentoo

[depontius]

I've been running Gentoo since 1.4 - I first got there when RedHat 8 came out with no decimal point after the 8, which was when they changed their distribution from the good old N.0, N.1, N.2, N+1.0 days. I cast about for a few months, thinking about ease of support, and then one day realized that this was supposed to be FUN. Shortly after that, I began moving to Gentoo, and have been happy since, until recently.

The first thing that happened was the premature death of an old friend, of pancreatic cancer at 52. (I'm 55.) In some of the ruminations following, I began to wonder what would happen to my family if something similar were to happen to me. Somewhere way low on the list, I realized that I have a home lan that only I can maintain. Gentoo is an expert's system, and once you start shoving several services on it, then meld that to several domain services from DynDNS, layer NFSV4 on top of RAID-1 on a filesystem with tweaked defaults, etc, you come up with something that will in the course of a few weeks/months bit-rot and be beyond salvage. I have a pair of redundant servers, and a few months back my primary server blew a hard drive - half of the RAID pair. It's down for repair, though real life has kept me from getting to it for a few months, now.

When my kids started need their own computers, I put them on Ubuntu. My son is running 10.04 and is reasonably savvy, but not into it nearly enough to make a go of Gentoo. I fear that my current plan must be to restore the hardware on my primary server and together with my son, install Ubuntu Server 10.04. It has all of the services I run on Gentoo, but is more servicable. I'm not sure what I'm asking of Gentoo, just identifying a real concern. This past weekend I went through a fairly "normal" software update, but the OpenSSL upgrade took a few extra manual actions - a bit beyond allowing "Software Updates" to do its thing.

Next up - work. Several years back, when I began using Gentoo at work, I got marvelous diagnostics when things failed. I need to run a lot of proprietary CAD software for my job, so I have to adapt to it. Way back when, when that proprietary software failed to run, Gentoo would print pretty good clues guiding me on what to install or tweak to fix it. In fact, it was easier to do things on Gentoo than on the "official" Linux. Fast forward to the new Thinkpad I got a few weeks back. The "official" Linux (based of FC13) pretty much just works. I have a Gentoo install on the side, and I no longer get clues about how to make the proprietary stuff work. I can run ldd, but there used to be more hints come back than just that. Most of the time I'm not booting "company Linux" just to get the job done, but I'd like to not abandon Gentoo.
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[dmpogo]

I did not get the last point. Sure, Gentoo being generic distribution will not 'just work' on a particular hardware, when compared with
installation tuned to it (especially if there is a proprietary part). But what more hints in the past are you referring to ?

[depontius]

I'm not having problems running the hardware - it's the blasted binary-only software. In the past, if I tried to kick off this software and it failed, something in Gentoo would generally give me a message that was of some help. I could install another lib, tweak the build, wrap another environment variable, or some such. These days I just get a segfault or something equally unenlightening. I know about running ldd against bundled executables and shared libs, but that isn't enough. My debug skills clearly aren't top-notch, but in the past they were adequate. Now they're not, and I'm not sure what to emphasize in getting better. (Most usefulness in limited time.)
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[Shining Arcanine]

[depontius]

[nativemad]

[depontius]

[nativemad]

[cach0rr0]

Your reasons for looking to other distros are perfectly legitimate.

I put my mother (who is 67!) onto my old Precision M70, loaded with Ubuntu, for that very reason.
The laptop was bulky, and the battery non-functional, but she loved it.

When I finally got a new laptop, it was time to give her my Latitude D610. I had initially gone with Ubuntu because it has an automated method for performing updates - except, despite my instruction, my mother never installed the updates, so I worried she was at risk for compromise.

So I sat down and re-thought my strategy for keeping things updated for family members. Obviously, I need to spend as little time on it as possible. They need to be able to use the laptop when I'm away. But at the end of the day, unless there's a known bug affecting usability (one that a user would notice, not one that only a dev/admin would notice), or a security issue, if my mom is happy with her setup, is there really a pressing need to upgrade aside from those two caveats? Do I need to update xorg every day? Do I need to always be on the latest KDE, or the latest chromium, and so forth? Not for my 67 year old mother I don't. She loved Kontact, KDE-4.3, loved chromium, loved that she could voice chat with me on skype when I was traveling, and that was it - that's all she cared about. She cared that those applications stayed working exactly as they were. So unless a vuln popped up, why change things for her?

So the D610 became a Gentoo laptop. Never really needed to update it, just ran a periodic glsa-check -l affected and had the results mailed to me. Put her onto KDE-4.3, which was the latest at the time, and even now with her Win7 laptop she's getting frustrated, "I don't like this as well as that linux thing you put on my old computer" - of course part of that is just you old folk not liking things that are different

Of course the usual objection to that line of thinking is "but wait, if you do without a wholesale update on gentoo for too long, eventually every upgrade becomes painful!"
Which in the past was true, currently is less true (but still a valid concern), but really...when is the last time you had, say, a Windows install you didn't blow away after at most a couple of years? Servers excluded of course, for obvious reasons.

I ultimately came to the conclusion, if I can get through a few years with just a glsa-check here and there, I've gotten my money's worth from the install, and that this would be less painful than having to do regular wholesale updates, plus, purely from a statistical standpoint the fewer packages you're updating, the less chance something will go wrong.

The latter proved to be a big issue - her M70 is now sitting on my dinner table, because the update to 10.4 left her with an unbootable system.
Her D610 eventually died, but that was a blown mobo. The only work I ever did on it, here and there I'll spend the night at the parents' place, and stay up a bit late glsa-checking, updating a few things here and there, but not doing a heck of a lot. Of course, she's now on a new Windows 7 laptop, which scares me to death as I don't think she's savvy enough not to get phished.


That's my take on linux for family members at least.
Trade-offs for everything.

With my rationalization? Gentoo is most fitting.
With yours? Ubuntu is most fitting, or perhaps Fedora or Mint.

Nothing is "wrong" in this instance. I will strongly tout Gentoo's selling points for a curious linux user, but when it comes to family, who really, have no desire to "learn linux", the correct distro is the one you feel most confident will be functional without you around. If you feel glsa-check now and again is acceptable, gentoo is still tenable. If not, maybe it isn't.

I personally was comfortable that the gentoo system I set up for my mother would stay functional for years even without my intervention, and thanks to the absence of potentially vulnerable bloat, going to have fewer exploitable vulns than her old Ubuntu system even *without* me around to glsa-check.

You are frustrated as well. Your frustrations are perfectly sane - as text does not convey tone very well, I should point out I'm being sincere when I say that. For your personal usage, it may even be worthwhile to take a "breather" away from Gentoo. I can't speak for everyone, but I would imagine most would say "best of luck, take a breather, hope you don't write off Gentoo completely!", because your frustrations may well even lead to an epiphany that, upon your return, provides users/devs with ideas that can greatly improve the usability of Gentoo moving forward.

[depontius]

Actually, I ran my mother for quite a few years on Gentoo - in "glsa-check mode", just as you did, including having it email me with the results every time cron ran it. Then occasionally, when something turned up, I would call her and tell her to "press the Service button" that night before going to bed, and I would turn her computer off when I was done. The whole family would visit her spring and fall, and while there I would do a full update, so she was always in decent security shape and never too far behind on the whole system.

What I'm in right now isn't a matter of convenience or anything else, it's a moment of acknowledging mortality. My kids can do Ubuntu, and both know enough to keep up with the service updates. Neither are interested or sufficiently motivated in that direction to run and maintain Gentoo. So at the moment this is a logical choice for me. Of course I don't plan on kicking off any time soon. Once my prime server is back up on Ubuntu, I may tweak my backup and keep it on Gentoo, just to see if I can run a "heterogeneous (or warped?) mirror."

The real thing that's annoying about Ubuntu, or FC13 that I'm using for work, is that it looks more and more like Windows, and I don't mean that in a good way. The more it makes itself user friendly, the more it hides under layers of obfuscation, the more difficult it makes it to even contemplate doing anything manually on the system - the old "edit /etc/* way". Once upon a time I said that if Linux ever got to be too mainstream, I'd move to something else. So far Gentoo has sufficed as something else. What's odd is that my needs have become more mainstream, I guess. We used to call our one computer in the study "The Toy". It's no toy, any more. (Nor is it our one computer any more, either.)
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