[Sussex] A funny thing happened on the way to the Net

[Dominic Humphries]

Quoting Steve Dobson <steve at dobson.org>:

> What surprised me the most was Gentoo's showing. . . Gentoo is
> a distro that I think as targeted at developers, or people who
> want access to (or close to) the cutting edge.

I don't know. I use Gentoo, and I'm neither a developer nor someone who wants
cutting edge. I just like the portage system & the community support you get
with Gentoo.

And IME, Gentoo's out-of-the-box settings are nowhere near cutting 
edge: I still
haven't got the option of upgrading to Firefox 1.5, for instance. NVU, 
the HTML
editor I use when I can't be bothered to use a text editor, is still 
sitting at
0.9 despite 1.0 being released in June. And so on.

To get cutting-edge, you've got to deliberately tell it to use unstable
releases: On defaults, it will only install software that's been pretty
well-tested.

I must admit that sysadmin-ing a web host isn't something I know much 
about, but
I believe Debian packages are optimised for 386, while Gentoo optimizes for
whatever CPU you actually have - possibly sysadmins are thinking that if they
spend a fortune getting heavy-hitting CPUs, they might as well use a distro
that makes maximum use of them?

Just a thought. . .

Dominic