[sclug] Gentoo...

[Darren Davison]

On Sunday 28 November 2004 11:34, Hamlesh Motah wrote:
> It seems that most distros fly under my radar, personally I only seem to
> pay attention to Slack and BSD.
>
> Anyway, my question is simple, why has there been so much hype over
> Gentoo recently?

Hi,

I've been lurking here for a while and noting the Gentoo threads with 
interest as a committed Gentoo-er for a few years now.

For me, it's simply the best distro to use since it gives so much control 
and flexibility.  It *is* higher maintenance than pre-compiled distros but 
I wouldn't give it up for anything.  I used Dead Rat (briefly) and SuSE for 
about 2 years, before switching all of my boxes over to Gentoo.

The ability to compile all software to match your own hardware (rather than 
the lowest common denominator that pre-compilation necessarily dictates) is 
great, despite the time involved to build packages such as KDE/GNOME.  
There are however tools like ccache and distcc that help significantly in 
this area.

I think also, the Gentoo website, documentation and user community (there 
are often >800 people in #gentoo on irc.freenode.net) are second to none 
and make it much more of a fun experience.  But the portage package 
management tool simply blows anything else I've seen so far out of the 
water it's not even funny (Debian possibly excepted, but it's still much 
better than apt).

Wouldn't recommend trying to run it as a first distro though.

Just my $0.02.  Regards,

-- 
Darren Davison
Public Key: #DD356B0D
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