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> |
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> About his pondering on whether Gentoo is right for him and about Gentoo |
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> having been more and more work to maintain recently -- I wholeheartedly |
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> agree. I just haven't found anything better, yet. |
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> |
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|
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It hasn't been more and more work for me, but then I try to maintain |
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a minimalist system, which means I avoid these bloated, do-it-all-for- |
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everyone monstrosities like KDE or Gnome. A simple window manager |
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is good enough for my purposes. |
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|
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But what is meant by "better?" If you seek to eliminate the work |
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of administration, that is, as I understand it, not the goal of Gentoo. |
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In order to customize a system to ones liking, one has to to understand |
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thoroughly how the system functions. Gentoo facilitates customization |
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but it does not eliminate the need to understand -- and understanding |
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can involve a lot of work. If the user is not willing to research and |
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explore, then the user should indeed be advised to seek elsewhere. |
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|
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IMO, for one who seeks control and the ability to customize, there is |
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nothing better than Gentoo. The only alternative is to build and |
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maintain a system independently, in the manner of Linux From Scratch. |
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|
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But I've been down that road. Until recently, I used to compile all |
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my own packages and completely administer my own personal "distribution." |
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It was a fair amount of work, but with the proper organization and |
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a lot of ambition ambition, it was quite feasible. However, certain |
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developments in the Open Source world eventually served to dampen my enthusiasm. |
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The most significant of these developments was the splitting of the X Window |
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package from one into literally dozens of individual programs. With |
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this change -- as well as several others that I won't mention -- the work |
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load slowly became more and more unbearable, and I realized that I would |
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not be able to continue doing it alone. After considering a lot of |
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possibilities, I discovered Gentoo and realized that my needs could be |
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once again be fulfilled without the excessive burden. |
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|
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It should also be considered that perhaps the upstream developers are |
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making things more difficult. Many new packages that have been released |
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seem to break everything that depends on them. For example, a new jpeg |
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library, version 7, was released recently (which has not yet made it |
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into Gentoo) that will require a rebuild of every program that processes |
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images, and this includes the extensive GTK package as it uses libjpeg |
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for its pixbuffer loader. Another example is the new gcc compiler, version |
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4.4.x. I have noticed that many packages will fail to compile with the |
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new version of gcc and this necessitates that the previous version, 4.3.3, |
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be also kept installed on the system. Lastly, do I need to mention the |
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fiasco with the update of the xcb package for X Window? Once again, a single |
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change has broken everything that has gone before. It has to be admitted |
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that these upstream developers are not making life any easier for the |
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distribution maintainers. |
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|
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But that's the nature of progress, I suppose. Fortunately, Gentoo can give |
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the serious user a set of tools to better deal with these inevitable changes. |
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|
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Frank Peters |