Gentoo vs Source Mage

[Exigentsky]

Recently, Source Mage has been getting a little more attention and they have released version .5 of their distribution. I am a curious guy and I want to give them a try, afterall they are both fast and advanced source based distributions.

Can someone give me good pros and cons of this distribution and Gentoo? What are their main differences. They both seem to have quite a few developers.

http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=The+Source+Mage+Developers
http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/devlist.xml

and are updated frequently

http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=gentoo
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=sourcemage

Has anyone here tried Source Mage, if so waht are your experiences with it How does their system (Sorcery) compare to portage

They have quite a lot of information here: http://wiki.sourcemage.org/index.php?page=SourceMageWiki

Thanks a lot!
_________________
No one is a virgin, life screws us all.

[rbonthond]

from one of the sm developers:

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3047#82220

[Bowyakka]

sourcemage is kind of like harry potter meets linux

Its quite cool but imho gentoo comes accross as more professional , so if I show someone gentoo I often say things like "gentoo has a good package system that is like ports and apt get but is alwasy very up2date" whereas I would be rather embarresed to show some one err to install I cast a spell
_________________
glows in the dark

[Exigentsky]

The way Sorcery sounds is quite cool. It's a cheerful way to install programs and most people would like the funny metaphor. I think it's better than Gentoo's metaphor.

Anyway who here has atuallly tried both OSes and can comment?
_________________
No one is a virgin, life screws us all.

[brad]

I like gentoo because it doesn't hide the details of the system. I don't want extra abstractions to make it easier. I want the straight dope so to speak, and gentoo does just that. I too would be embarassed to hide behind a spells and sorcery metaphor. But hey.. whatever gets the kiddies playing is alright by me.

[DuF]

In my opinion both are great but I think that gentoo is more transparent, so maybe more difficult but I prefer to learn how my system works by me.

[KiTaSuMbA]

Nooo! They did it again...
I had this suspicion on reading that name... it sounded too familiar. So I go on and check their homepage. OMG, it's another sorcerer spawn. I also learn that the original went down and up again on a non-forkable license (non-forkable? I doubt this can be OSI-approved and if it isn't I doubt again that it can work well with the GPL software it installs... bahhh).
Back when I started considering source-based distros, I was trying to make up my mind among a few of them (rock linux, gentoo and - guess what - sorcerer). After almost a year, I clearly see I made the right choice!
_________________
Need to flame people LIVE on IRC? Join #gentoo-otw on freenode!

[modal]

imho...
Gentoo=Gold Medal
Source-Mage=Participation Trophy

[nuvan]

all in all, I have to say that while I am happy using Gentoo right now, if for some reason gentoo were to completely die, I dont' think I would have a problem switching to Source Mage Linux.

I say Kudos to them for their naming scheme. It would, IMO, make the whole experience that much more fun. No need for linux to always be serious.

Granted they don't have as many packages as Gentoo, but they are a new distro, so I'll cut them some slack on that one.

Above it all, I remember that one of the principles of the Open Source Movement is choice. Here we have another choice.

Just my $0.25
_________________
This space under construction