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On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 8:23 AM, James <wireless@×××××××××××.com> wrote: |
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> Both are rolling distros. Both can be build up from sources, although |
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> Arch makes the binary install path the default for its (new) users, |
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> as well as recovery of binaries that get deleted or become corrupted. |
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Arch doesn't offer the equivalent of USE flags does it? Virtually any |
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distro will let you build a package from sources - typically with the |
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goal of obtaining the same binary that the distro distributes. The |
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main distinction Gentoo has is that building from source is the main |
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supported installation method, and the tailoring of packages so that |
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they are unique to each system is fairly well-supported. |
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You could build all your own packages on Debian from source and |
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install them, but there wouldn't be much point in doing that. Unless |
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you basically build them with the same settings Debian is already |
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using (maybe you could get away with a very minor CFLAGS tweak or |
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something like that) you are pretty likely to run into problems. If |
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you are just going to use the Debian settings, you might as well just |
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install their binaries. The main use case for building from source on |
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something like Debian would be if you just want to apply a patch to a |
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single package, ideally something without a lot of reverse |
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dependencies. |
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> |
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> Both distros offer Systemd. |
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Yup - the arch docs are actually pretty useful for anybody using |
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Systemd on Gentoo since many of the Gentoo docs are a bit |
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openrc-centric, though that is changing. |
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> The notable difference is Arch has some of the best documataion of any |
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> linux distro; Gentoo struggles to document many key components. |
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Interestingly enough people used to say the same thing about Gentoo - |
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when I look at the Arch documents they tend to look a lot like how the |
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Gentoo docs looked in the mid-2000s. People in my local user group |
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often commented that they ran Debian but usually referenced the Gentoo |
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docs. |
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> Arch Linux is the 8th most popular linux distro, whilst Gentoo, |
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> despite being 3 years older, is number 47, if you believe what various |
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> sites say. |
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I'm sure Arch is more popular these days, but I wouldn't put TOO much |
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stock in distrowatch. |
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Heck, I just checked my user agent and it says: |
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Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) |
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Chrome/37.0.2062.94 Safari/537.36 |
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Good luck figuring out that I'm running Gentoo from that. |
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Since Gentoo uses rolling releases it is a bit hard to get hard |
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numbers on the install base. At my local linux user group people |
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running Ubuntu would always be happy to grab CDs when a new version |
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came out (one of the attendees used to get them to hand out). That |
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made sense since with Ubuntu/Debian you tend to do just minor patching |
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between releases and then you practically re-install everything except |
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/home during major releases, especially if you followed LTS. With |
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Gentoo nobody really does it that way, and we don't get the quarterly |
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news site "new release" posts. |
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Bottom line is that it is hard to measure Gentoo popularity. I've |
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been using Gentoo since the early 2000s and in practice I can't really |
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see any decline, even if there aren't as many devs as there once were. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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