Re: [gentoo-user] Re: about the 2007.1

[Albert Hopkins]

Most of you can stop reading right now ;-)

I can see that people seem to like Gentoo for different reasons.  Here's
what attracted me go Gentoo:

I'm not a Windows convert.  I started using Linux before Windows really
made its mark.  I remember when most people ran 1 or 2 Windows apps and
everything else ran in DOS (especially games).

I started using Unix at my university in the early 90s.  I loved it.
For me it was like DOS on steroids.  I'm a power user, and Unix was
powerful, very customizable, and did things you could never dream of
doing with WinDOS.  I remember thinking "if only I could run Unix on my
PC..."

Enter Linux.  My first distro was Slackware, around 1994.  Slackware is
one of the first distros and was so named because it was intended for
"slackers" who were too lazy/inexperienced to install Linux from scratch
and needed a nice little installer.  It's ironic that today Slackware is
considered the "difficult" distro and Ubuntu could be considered
"Slackware Ultimate."

Initially for me, being a newbie, Slackware fit in fine.  But one of the
problems I had with it was that software updates didn't come fast
enough, and updating the distribution was usually a re-install as
opposed to an update.  I'd typically find myself installing a very
minimal Slackware base install and pretty much everything else I
downloaded and installed from source into /usr/local. I was already used
to compiling from source from my Unix days (I remember having to
manually edit Makefiles before we had tools like ./configure) so none of
this intimidated me.  But the old software, package management and
upgrades (or lack thereof) made Slackware difficult to manage.

I tried Red Hat (and briefly Debian) but none of them really satisfied
me.  Then I found out about Gentoo.  It was awesome.  I could do all the
low-level stuff I did with Slackware (and more) yet get package
management *and* upgrades were a no-brainer.  And the power!  Gentoo
doesn't get in your way and it's hard to find something it can't do.  I
also love stage1 installs. Good stuff!

I hope Gentoo doesn't go too far from its roots for the sake of becoming
more popular or appealing to a different/wider audience.  Not that I
don't welcome changes when they're needed/helpful, but if it goes
against Larry's fundamental philosophy* (and mine) about what makes
Gentoo a great distro then I'm likely to oppose it.

* Larry the cow: see http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml


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