Looking for New Distribution

jnash2001 · Post by **jnash2001** » Sun Dec 02, 2007 3:39 pm

If you wanna laugh a bit, follow this links.

They are about _the_ Gentoo syndrome.
I found them through Mark's Pilgrim blog, have fun:
Gentoo is for Ricers
Mandrake -> Gentoo a.k.a. "Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome"

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 10:24 am

Wally Balljacker wrote:
mobius111001 wrote:I've wanted to try Gentoo out, but have heard how it take a long time to install. I'll throw that on a test machine I recently acquired.
Just for a heads up, you will be waiting awhile to compile anything desktop-related. You really want at least a 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 for compiling things like KDE and Firefox. But nowadays, with dual and quad-core systems becoming the norm, compiling is really quite trivial.

I did Gentoo on an Athlon XP 1700+ and it took roughly a day for everything, including Gnome. The newer stage 3 installs are a bit easier, and actually work for me. Following the instructions to the letter pretty much works. You can get a working kernel the first time, if you do what the instructions say, and don't randomly turn things on and off because you think it's a good idea.

Sadly I've dumped Gentoo on 2 systems in favor of Debian. Gentoo worked OK, but was never solid and bug free. Some things just never worked. After several months with no updates on my desktop, I did an "emerge world" and broke the system completely. I just didn't feel like reading all the documentation again and scouring the forums to try to fix it.

I did find better performance on my server with Gentoo, but on a system slow enough to benefit from the extra performance, compiling takes so much longer. Having a destktop running Gentoo help with the compiling (using distcc) helps, but I have to dedicate a whole 'nother system to Gentoo. It's also a pain to set up.

I realize I can hand pick just the vital updates on the server, but I don't have the time to invest. The older profiles (although stable) don't seem to get maintained as well. Overall I'm seeing quality dropping in Gentoo, and it's doesn't compare to Debian for polish.

Vogateer · Post by **Vogateer** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 1:47 pm

Gomer_X wrote: After several months with no updates on my desktop, I did an "emerge world" and broke the system completely. I just didn't feel like reading all the documentation again and scouring the forums to try to fix it.

There is my main complaint with Gentoo. You have to be consistently upgrading via "emerge world" if you ever want to use "emerge world" at all, or risk breaking things some day when you do it. It improved a bit when I took better care of the compilation tools, but breakage still happened.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 04, 2007 2:15 pm

Vogateer wrote:
Gomer_X wrote: After several months with no updates on my desktop, I did an "emerge world" and broke the system completely. I just didn't feel like reading all the documentation again and scouring the forums to try to fix it.
There is my main complaint with Gentoo. You have to be consistently upgrading via "emerge world" if you ever want to use "emerge world" at all, or risk breaking things some day when you do it. It improved a bit when I took better care of the compilation tools, but breakage still happened.

BUT DUDE!!!!!!!! LIFE AIN'T EXCITING IF EVERYTHING WORKS ALL THE TIME!!!!!!!!!

/Sarcasm