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

[Jesús Guerrero]

El Mar, 3 de Febrero de 2009, 23:39, Grant Edwards escribió:
> Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system
> similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source. The main
> benefit claimed for this approach is that you get better performance
> because all executables are optimized for exactly the right instruction
> set.
>
> Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
> parroted by so many people?

There are parrots in all the social groups. That doesn't mean
that there aren't skilled users that see the real benefit. The
difference is that skilled users (or simply those that use the
system for real advantages and not due to some parrot axiom
like this one) don't go echoing how normal they are all around.

The result is that you only hear parrots, but that doesn't mean
they are the whole nor even the majority of a given community.

> AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization
> is practically nil in real-world usage.
>
> In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such
> as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that mires other
> binary-based distros.

Yes. I wholeheartedly agree with you here. USE flags they are.
And I love this part of Gentoo.

> The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system
> actually works over the long-run.  With RedHat/Mandrake, things would
> gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was unmaintainable,
> but attempting to upgrade between major releases was always futile.  I've
> had Gentoo machines that have been upgraded for 4-5 years without any
> significant problems (failed hard-drives don't count).

Those who reinstall do it for various reasons. Some are legit (ie.
migration from x86 to amd64), some are just hobbyist stuff (most
of the times). And some people reinstall because they do all kind
of colorful things that break the system to an unusable state.
Gentoo is easy to break if you don't read the manuals and are
unable to put a minimal degree of common sense behind your actions.

That's the dark side of the force. However, I love it.

> The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more
> packages available for Gentoo.  Putting together and maintaining an ebuild
> appears to take a lot less work than putting together and maintaining a
> binary RPM package.

Ditto. And upgrading is usually as easy as to use cp to created
a new version.

A big big advantage is that besides the huge number of packages
that we have, we also have dozens of overlays. Some of which are for
very specific tasks, and some of them are really bug.

Performance is just as good as with any other distro, as long as
both are configured in the same -read sane- way. No distro can make
your pc 200% faster, only a new $$mobo-cpu-ram$$ combo can do that.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero