[Lincs] Distro

[James Taylor]

MD wrote:
> On 3/29/07, Chris Adams <heelfliper at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I cat be botherd to read all your emails. 
How nice of you to side step any argument against your choice of system.
>> The reason I am using gentoo is
>> because it is flexible and will take up less room compared to ubuntu or
>> knoppix.
> By that logic, why no just use Damn Small Linux?
I'm not convinced that you're making valid comparisons - Ubuntu and 
Knoppix are both Debian based, and Gentoo should really be compared 
against Debian, the difference being that Debian doesn't give you tons 
of default packages.

In gentoo's favour, the pro of smaller program size (because nothing 
extra is compiled in) isn't just in the disk space but in quicker 
loading times and in the long run, less paging time. However, I've not 
yet seen enough evidence to show that the speedup of Gentoo, or the disk 
space gained is in the favour of it, Nor have i seen any argument which 
is in gentoos favour based upon its flexibility. I will say from my 
experiences, its slightly easier for you to do custom compiles in gentoo 
because everything is custom compiled, then debian's apt-get source and 
dpkg package stuff, but there have been a lot newer and easier to use 
tools developed for debian's package manger since I was last doing these 
custom compiles.

I would have to say that from a Sysadmin point of view, the *EASE* of 
managing and maintaining a system must outweigh any performance or disk 
size - you can improve performance by throwing money at it (Sata raid 
arrays and high speed buses remove the size of program from the 
equation), but when something goes wrong on a friday night, you're down 
time can not be solved by anything other then the system administrators 
ability to get it back up again fast, and having a system which lets 
them install and remove packages quickly and without having to compile 
or anything, is (in my opinion) very important.

JT