On Sat, 23 Oct 2004 16:07:58 -0500, John Reese <jwreese0 at comcast.net> wrote: > I have been a Linux desktop user and sysadmin for four years - main > experience is Redhat/Fedora, Suse, and Slackware. I have no experience > with Gentoo, but I notice the community has a lot to say about it. > Looking for education here - why would I want to try Gentoo, and why do > you like it? I just about started writing an explanationg of why I love gentoo, but then I realized that the answer can be found in a quote from the gentoo website: "The Gentoo philosophy, in a paragraph, is this. Every user has work they need to do. The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do their work pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit. Our tools should be a joy to use, and should help the user to appreciate the richness of the Linux and free software community, and the flexibility of free software. This is only possible when the tool is designed to reflect and transmit the will of the user, and leave the possibilities open as to the final form of the raw materials (the source code.) If the tool forces the user to do things a particular way, then the tool is working against, rather than for, the user. We have all experienced situations where tools seem to be imposing their respective wills on us. This is backwards, and contrary to the Gentoo philosophy." taken from here: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml I've been using Gentoo for about a year now, and I'm absolutely in love with it. After becoming comfortable with Gentoo in a "tesing" environment, I have since moved all but one of my linux boxes at work over to Gentoo. It has proven to be the most stable, flexible, and easy to maintain distribution I've had experience with. Before Gentoo, I was running Redhat and some Debian at work. One of the best things I've found in Gentoo world is the *very* active and helpful community of users it has. I have yet to find a problem that hasn't been easily solved by posting a question to either the gentoo forums or their IRC channel. I have heard a few nay-sayers on the list badmouth the use of Gentoo in production environments due to instability issues. I don't know exactly where they're coming from, as I've found Gentoo to be just as stable as any other linux distribution and *much* easier to maintain/update than any other. The only other distro that can compete w/ gentoo in the "ease of updating" category is Debian and its apt repository. I see Debian's apt and Gentoo's emerge as close cousins. The difference is that apt generally installs pre-compiled binary packages and emerge generally installs/compiles apps from source. If you know what you're doing, you can get a slight preformance increase by compiling from source if you set your build flags correctly. This is an area where you can get yourself in trouble. As with many things, along with the great things that Gentoo's flexibility provides, it also provides opportunities for you to make life very difficult for yourself. If you set the wrong build flags, you run the chance of having apps that won't even run correctly on your processor or having apps that are very buggy and unstable. Well I think that's all I have for now. If you decide to give gentoo a go, please feel free to write me with any questions you come up with. Also, as I mentioned before, the forums and irc channel are both great resources as well. -Erik Anderson _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list