[Cumbria] Gentoo Zealot Translator-o-matic

[Michael Saunders]

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic

Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great
features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless
wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity.
Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it
really means...


   "Gentoo makes me so much more productive."

"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling
something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time
to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable
optimisation settings."


   "Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"

"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a
single program in my life or contributed to an open source project,
yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps
me contribute to international freedom."


   "I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."

"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine,
but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but
the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be
for using Gentoo."


   "Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."

"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands
of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user
input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant
difference with optimisations, and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with
a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with
the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."


   "...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."

"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the
third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."


   "You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."

"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be
resolved by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and
that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages
instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together
(which the system wasn't designed for)."


   "All the other distros are soooo out of date."

"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software
makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and
patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just
emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09
-fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."


   "Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."

"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the
near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still
eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met
on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"