Re: [gentoo-user] Goodbye, Gentoo

[Alex Schuster]

Alan McKinnon writes:

> Apparently, though unproven, at 01:28 on Friday 27 May 2011, Kevin
> O'Gorman did opine thusly:
> > It looks like it's time to take Gentoo off of my main machine.  I feel
> > a little sad about it, or I'd just quietly go away.
>
> I know how you feel :-)
>
> I've tried to get away from Gentoo several times, and failed. The amount
> of work we all put into keeping things working is best described as "bat
> shit crazy", but we do it anyway. Maybe it's like a drug thing, we all
> need a daily fix or we need to prove we can still do it.

I tried various distros (SuSE, Debian, Mandrake, Libranet, RedHat), but when 
I started using Gentoo, I was hooked. No fancy shmancy GUIs that hide what's 
really going on beneath, and that often enough have their own bugs so that 
it's easier to not use them. Rolling updates, no fear that upgrades mess up 
everything. Good documentation, that explains what has do be done and why, 
instead of just telling me what to do and where to click.

Yes, Gentoo means a lot of work to do. But for me it's less than before, all 
in all. And I can fix many things myself. When I had trouble with other 
distros, I was often unable so find a solution, apart from waiting for the 
next release. Which introduced new problems.

I installed some Ubuntus recently, that's supposed to be very easy to use, 
but not for me. The default install medium does not know much about LVM, I 
had to fetch an alternate install medium for this. After all updates were 
done, I ran into an old bug that killed all initramfs images after 
installing a new kernel. I found some threads of users who had no clue what 
to do now, in my case even older kernels were affected. It was simple to 
fix, but not for inexperienced users who had no clue what to do, apart from 
waiting for some Linux guy to help them or re-install. NIS and automount 
stuff sometimes fails, I was not able to find the cause for this, despite 
many threads mentioning this. Sometimes a simple reboot solves this, 
sometimes not. I have no clue.

It seems to work well on standard desktop systems, though. If the default is 
fine for you, Ubuntu is not bad I think. easier to set up, easier to 
maintain. But then I installed it on a notebook with little RAM, and ran 
into various problems. The installer even crashed once. I use Linux a lot, I 
administer some Linux servers, but I felt too stupid to install Ubuntu and 
WLAN via ndiswrapper.

And then there's things happening like the packet manager front-end refusing 
to start because the automatic update notification is still active, and only 
once instance of a package manager can be running at a time. Okay, this is 
not a big problem, just close the other application (or kill it, if another 
user has it open). But hey, with portage I can not only run queries while 
another portage process is running, I can even do it while emerge is 
installing things, and nowadays I can even have multiple emerges run in 
parallel without trouble. I got used to this.

BTW, in the past when I used Debian (ten years ago), it happened for two 
times that apt (the package manager) got corrupted and no longer worked. I 
didn't even know what I did wrong, in one case I was only following advice 
others gave me. The mailing list was no help at all, they suggested to 
simply re-install. Oh my, how I hate to do so and to configure everything 
again. And wait for the problems to happens again.

My Mom's new PC would get Ubuntu, as I do not want to spend too much time 
installing, and because she doesn't need much special configuring. But I 
think I will try ArchLinux which I heard good things of, but did not try 
yet.

	Wonko