1 |
Duncan wrote: |
2 |
> Sebastian Pipping posted on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:00:03 +0200 as excerpted: |
3 |
> |
4 |
>> Duncan wrote: |
5 |
>>> [L]et's get some context here. layman's no difficulty at all, really, |
6 |
>>> when compared to the ordinary stuff we expect Gentoo users to do all |
7 |
>>> the time. |
8 |
>> I think you forget about the learning curve: Gentoo users are not born |
9 |
>> as Gentoo users. They are coming from other distros (say Debian or |
10 |
>> Ubuntu). |
11 |
> |
12 |
> Not forgetting that, but perhaps forgetting how "unordinary" my own |
13 |
> experience was. I came from Mandrake, but researched Gentoo well enough |
14 |
> that I was already explaining portage basics based on the material in the |
15 |
> Handbook, etc, on the user list (and reading the dev list), before I even |
16 |
> had Gentoo installed. |
17 |
|
18 |
My first distro was also Mandrake. I eventually moved endlessly between |
19 |
Red Hat (before forking into Fedora) and Mandrake. The reason was the |
20 |
broken rpm package manager (and repo) which had a peculiar way of naming |
21 |
library .so names which interfered with my "hand-built" packages. |
22 |
|
23 |
I found Gentoo when a friend of mine told me there was a distro which |
24 |
was capable of producing CPU *optimized* code because all the packages |
25 |
were built from source. At the time (6~7 years ago?), I didn't have idea |
26 |
such distro could exist but that idea made sense and was left hard-coded |
27 |
in my head. |
28 |
|
29 |
That is when I read the *Gentoo philosophy* page (yes, there is people |
30 |
that reads it) and immediately got in love with it. That was Gentoo's |
31 |
biggest selling point for me. Then the handbook followed and you can |
32 |
probably guess the rest of the story. |
33 |
|
34 |
> |
35 |
> I like to think that if I can do it, everybody can, but regardless of |
36 |
> whether they /can/ or not, it's a fact that not everybody /does/, as |
37 |
> demonstrated by the fact that people were asking the questions I was |
38 |
> answering. |
39 |
|
40 |
I think it is not a matter of capable of doing it or not but rather |
41 |
matching one's needs. It is also a fact that most people *don't get it* |
42 |
when it comes to the question *why gentoo*. |
43 |
> |
44 |
> I /do/ sometimes forget /that/ end of it, that for whatever reason, not |
45 |
> everybody chooses to read the handbook, etc, even if it's ultimately only |
46 |
> making the job of sysadmining their own Gentoo boxen an order of |
47 |
> magnitude harder than it should be. |
48 |
> |
49 |
>> For me it was unmasking that confused me a lot in the beginning. There |
50 |
>> is three different kinds, one is not in "the books" afaik and it's no |
51 |
>> fun to me to do. I guess without autounmask by now I would be so |
52 |
>> frustrated to not use Gentoo anymore. |
53 |
|
54 |
The most confusing stuff for me was to learn all the GNU/Linux basics |
55 |
that I had as granted while using other distros. |
56 |
|
57 |
(...) |
58 |
|
59 |
Just my 2 cents about what mattered to *me* (and still matters) when I |
60 |
moved to Gentoo. |
61 |
-- |
62 |
Angelo Arrifano AKA MiKNiX |
63 |
Gentoo Embedded/OMAP850 Developer |
64 |
Linwizard Developer |
65 |
http://www.gentoo.org/~miknix |
66 |
http://miknix.homelinux.com |