[Klug-general] Debian 4.0 released

[Allen Brooker]

Karl Latimer wrote:
> My views on gentoo go something like this;
> 
> If I wanted a highly optimised one time OS built for doing a specific
> job, as fast as the hardware would allow, a completely trimmed down OS
> which doesn't require all and sundry deps for doing x and y which don't
> interest me, and I need to hack hard on it to fit it into a tight little
> box, small storage, little hardware but the need to get the max out of
> what I've got... I'd choose gentoo. Gentoo isn't even good for learning
> linux internals, AFAIK gentoo excludes some of the Linuxy features in
> favor of older tried and tested methods, eg udev, maybe they do use it
> now, and also sysfs, maybe they use that too. Sure you learn about
> optimised builds, but not necessarily Linux...

Gentoo has used udev for years - atleast ever since I started using it, 
which was some time back in 2005 and probably well before then. It has 
also continued to provide devfs for those still using 2.4 based setups 
(although I think recent releases of certain things like glibc have 
meant it's moving away from this).

I don't get your emphasis on optimised builds here. Most users set up 
their CFLAGS and other related items according to the bog standard setup 
(usually along the lines of "-march=<whatever> -O2", perhaps with a 
"-pipe" in there too) and never touch them again.

While Gentoo can be used for ricing (using insance CFLAGS, CHOST, 
LDFLAGS setups in a silly attempt to get that extra 0.00000000000001% 
out of your machine), this is only a very small portion of the community 
and is generally actively discouraged by the Gentoo developers.

As I pointed out in my other post, if a user is looking for a purely 
desktop distro to install on their office machine and just wants to run 
linux, then yes I'd advise a distro such as Ubuntu. However, for users 
who want to learn about linux, how it works and how to administrate it, 
I believe Gentoo is an excellent distro.