Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Gentoo's advantage: 'optimized for your system' -- huh?

[Jesús Guerrero]

El Jue, 5 de Febrero de 2009, 7:07, Nikos Chantziaras escribió:
> Sebastián Magrí wrote:
>
>> The installation experience with the traditional method must be
>> mandatory... That's why I think we are better now that GLI is
>> deprecated...
>
> That's not good.  It hurts Gentoo's popularity if it's not easy to
> install.  But since there are not enough devs left for the GUI installer,
> not much that can be done.
>
> Gentoo isn't unsuitable for a GUI installer.  It's stage 3, after all.

That's definitely good. It never worked and newbies came to
Gentoo thinking that it as some kind of uberfaster ubuntu
thing that could be installed by just clicking next.

Then they ran away yelling how bad this gentoo crap is that
doesn't work at all unless you do a lot of black magic on the
command line! "Because I want full control over my system, but
only clicking next. The OS should read my mind!"

If we clear that from the beginning so everyone knows what to
expect from gentoo AND WHAT GENTOO EXPECTS FROM YOU then that
problem is gone.

Some would call this a nazi attidute of mine, I would say that
you can't drive an f-17 unless you are willing to prepare
yourself to do so before. It's called realism. You need to
learn before you can do. Even a child can understand that.

Someone would argue that's too hard to start, but that's why
we have excellent docs, mailing lists, forums and irc, with
a very high traffic and lots of friendly people giving away
their time for free to help you. So, whomever can't find a
way is either too lazy or too shy to talk to the people around.

Gentoo was never meant to win a popularity price. I prefer to
stay without nothing at all that to have the lot of problems
that the installer has been creating during 3 years of existence.
It harmed the gentoo popularity (if you like that argument)
much more than the lack of a installer.

Besides that, there's no easy way that you will understand Gentoo
if you are not going to read the handbook. And even then, it takes
time to become familiar with the way that USE flags truly work
(and I mean to understand it, and not just do -qt -kde +gnome +gtk
blindly that most users do (or the other way around) without
even knowing what's behind the scene and how USE flags and ebuilds
relate to each other.

Let's assume it: you are building a distro. It's easy enough as it
is. Usability is good, but the only way that Gentoo could get
easier is just by taking features away and lowering the degree of
control that the users have.

There are enough easy-to-use distros. Let us, "masochists", live in
peace. We love pain, why do people care so much about what we do
with our privacy? :P [it's a joke, in case anyone didn't notice]

There have been several attempts to make a decent installer. They
all failed miserably and got abandoned. Why? Because to tell the
truth, no one has an authentic interest in the matter. The simple
answer is most probably the right one.

By the way, did I already said that anyone that can read can also
install Gentoo? Lost of people with no experience with linux did
it with very little or no help.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero