Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Distrowatch

[Paul Sebastian Ziegler]

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Caleb Cushing schrieb:

> right now were 12 going up probably from all the sites saying negative
> things. funny sabayon a gentoo fork and overlay is in 8. I know these
> statistics aren't 100% accurate (given how they're generated) but maybe
> they mean something.

I just had to check that one out. Haven't been to Distrowatch for about
a year.
Some thoughts I had:

*The person addressed here is not Caleb. This is targeted at the
"general" public of this list*

- - Sabayon is a liveCD. It is created to make people interested. Why?
Because this is not the
recovery-boot-into-ram-fire-up-bash-and-restore-your-hd sort of LiveCD.
This one is full featured.
So whom does it target? People who are not sure what they want yet. That
is a good thing. I haven't been sure what kind of distro I'd need for
years. I probably even have more LiveCDs then AOL-Install CDs in my home
- - and there isn't a single week where that ISP doesn't send out it's
trash.
So people are interested. They want to try before they buy and thus
throw in some LiveCD.
Everything is working nicely? Cool. Just install it to your HD and you
can be sure that there won't be any trouble configuring the Kernel or
some daemons.

- - BUT: This is Gentoo. Why do you use it? Because it is some easily
running mildly secure out of the box distro? Or do you use it because it
gives you the power to do whatever you like, taking all the chances to
create (and break) your perfect system? Because it will never force you
to use something like Yast? Because you can create about anything from a
full-fledged high-end gaming machine to a webserver to an embedded
system of about 25 MB? And if you want Pentium-M optimized packages with
SSP and PIE - no Problem. Just change half a dozen options in make.conf
and recompile. You are even able to play around. I got a computer
casemodded into a Record Player. It is running Gentoo, boots up in about
5 Seconds and listens to my voice commands in order to play music. No
other distro could have been adjusted this drastically. And that is why
I (<- subjective individualist opinion) love and use Gentoo.

- - I never looked at Gentoo as some sort of mainstream Distribution. If
Gentoo intended to win a popularity contest it would work completely
differently from the ground up. Most users aren't interested in choices.

No matter how much flames/traffic I get on all the Gentoo-related lists
(which recently has become a lot), no matter what Distrowatch, Golem or
some other site says, no matter how many breakages I get from emerge
- -uDv world (as long as I'll still be able to keep my system running) -
I'll continue to use Gentoo because it is the only system that fits my
needs.

I know that right now everyone is quite edgy. That many people try to
defend what they are and who they are and that many people are angry.
Many of them are right.
But opposed to that I want to say something completely different:
Thank You.

Thanks to all the old devs, thanks to all the new devs, thanks to
everyone contributing and thanks to the many whom I've forgotten.
In my opinion this is still one of the bests distros around. And you
made that possible.

My two cents
Paul
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