Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo for me?

[Frank Steinmetzger]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 05:34:25AM -0600, Dale wrote:

> >     There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good
> >     American. The only man who
> >     is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.
> >      -Theodore Roosevelt,
> >     1915

Reminds me of the new P.C. term for a blonde -- a breasted American. ;-)

> > Gentoo is for everyone. And I love it!

> I used to be on dial-up as most old timers here may recall.  Here are
> the bad things:  Libreoffice and a full KDE upgrade.  It would take me
> DAYS to download everything.  Heck, it takes me a while and I have DSL
> now.  Just be prepared.
>
> I don't know about your area but here, DSL was cheaper than dial-up when
> I first got it.  Right now, they are the same price, last I checked on
> the dial-up prices anyway.  You may want to check those prices IF you
> can get DSL.
>
> Is Gentoo doable, yea.  Does it take patience, yep it does.  Dial-up is
> slow.

It's just as slow for binary people. And if you're not using something very
static, you have just as much download volume I reckon. I have Debian testing
on my old laptop and when I update it just after a few weeks on absence,
there's always a new patch release of KDE, libreoffice and the kernel. All in
all there's always more than 500 megs of DL.
The only difference for us Gentooans is that we always have the development
files included which create some overhead. OTOH, for new kernel version we even
have the advantage -- on binary distros, each patch release means to download
35-40 megs of precompiled modules, whereas we only download the 80 MB sources
once for a subrelease, and for each subsequent patch only need a few
additional kB.

I second the suggestion that, if you decide to stay with Gentoo, you just need
to keep the sources of all installed packages. I used to have an unstable VPN
connection which counted my traffic, so I kept all installed distfiles in case
I needed to rebuild someting (changed useflags, revdep-rebuild, etc).
eclean-dist is a good helper here, which will delete only those files whose
packages aren't installed (any more).
-- 
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