Re: [gentoo-user] Home page slowness

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 11 May 2008, Florian Philipp wrote:
> On Sat, 10 May 2008 16:43:41 +0100
>
> Mick <michaelkintzios@×××××.com> wrote:
> > The OP has inadvertently given us some valuable feedback, which
> > stands on its own and is irrelevant with the fact that he (like
> > many other non-gentoo users) had mistaken Gentoo for
> > yet-another-binary-distro.  Having a user friendly website that
> > also caters to the needs of newcomers to the Gentoo scene, requires
> > that the key features and benefits of Gentoo are easily
> > visible/accessible.  Not many people will navigate to hidden
> > Statistics pages to draw their own conclusions.  These could be
> > users that one day prove valuable contributors.  I suggest that we
> > spring clean the website and consider our new visitors needs at the
> > same time (plus things like the much asked for Documentation search
> > field?).  ;-)
> >
> > Just my 2c's.
>
> Yep, gentoo.org really seems to have been created from devs and users
> for devs and users. There is nothing like a "Features" page or "Why
> to choose Gentoo" for newcomers. Heck, you have to search hard to
> even learn whether it is suitable for desktops or servers! Just
> compare ubuntu.com with gentoo.org, for example. The difference is
> striking.

Ah, but www.gentoo.org/doc actually does contain decent INFORMATION in a 
manner that I can find.

All I ever seem to get out of ubuntu.com (after the cute front page) is 
the equivalent of Ubuntu For Dummies or endless chitter-chatter on web 
forums almost exclusively populated by 14 year olds. Or people mentally 
equivalent to 14 year olds.

gentoo is a lot like Ferraris, Buells and Crays - virtually nobody, but 
nobody, gets involved with them without being quite knowledgeable about 
the subject as a whole and having a very good idea of what they are all 
about.

Let's put it another way. Person X from company Y is evaluating distros 
and is put off by www.gentoo.org's front page. Right. Now, what kind of 
user is person X do you think? Someone who will be able to use Gentoo 
to it's full potential right away? No, I don't think so. If you need to 
read the front page to find out the basics of what it is, then you 
shouldn't be anywhere near Gentoo as a corporate. You'd be much better 
off looking into the well-known binary distros.

I'm not spouting steam out my nose here. My day job is looking after 20 
gentoo servers out in the wild at customer's premises. My personal 
machines have been exclusively gentoo for over 3 years now. I'm 
migrating the customer's machines over to Ubuntu server LTS one by one 
as the hardware gets upgraded. Why? Why does someone, who is well known 
in my city for being the biggest Gentoo fan around, do that?

Because I cannot deal with the learning curve of my juniors anymore. I 
don't want to have to still make every USE related decision on every 
machine even though a junior is sitting right there logged in. It makes 
complete sense for $ARB_UBUNTU_DEV to make those decisions instead.

So let's tidy up gentoo.org by all means and make it a bit more obvious 
how this awesome thing called portage works. But lets not be deceived 
into thinking the distro itself is a mass-market distro because it 
isn't. It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian 
machinery. And I like it that way.


-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

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