Looks like Gentoo is a sinking ship.

theMerge · Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2011 8:29 pm Post subject:

We are still doing this? Crap!

I switched to Ubuntu a few years back because I didn't have the time (or desire) to work up and maintain a Gentoo System. Since Ubuntu is now a glorious resource hog (imho, no flame intended here) I moved back home to Gentoo. I found several things to be true.

- Gentoo installed clean, fast (for gentoo) and easily. In fact it was easier this time than ever before.
- Gentoo is no longer "bleeding edge", rather it is up to date and stable. This is better for me.
- Once I worked out the kinks, it was faster, less buggy, and nearly as feature rich as Ubuntu.
- It is lean and does not have bloat... just like always... unless you want it to.

Far from dead, Gentoo has proven itself to be a viable distro that suits my needs as a web developer to the "T". Of course there are the fringe cases where Gentoo falls short, but that's true no matter where you go. For the most part Gentoo feels just as strong as it always has.

GJ Devs, and long live Gentoo
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dirkfanick · Posted: Fri Apr 29, 2011 10:46 am Post subject:

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I remember the first time that I tried to install Gentoo, probably back in 2005 or 2006. I used the LiveCD, and I didn't understand it. It gave me a bunch of checkboxes for 'features' which I could enable or disable, so I scrolled through this list of what looked like hundreds of 'features', wondering exactly what they were for. After I chose some features and clicked through a few more prompts, Gentoo said that it was installing, and I knew that it could take a while, so I left my computer on overnight, but nothing seemed to happen. I tried a couple variations on this a few times, but it didn't work, so I eventually installed Ubuntu.

Now I know that they were USE flags, and realize that (in my opinion), having an automated, graphical installer is against the spirit of Gentoo. It's fine for other distributions, like Ubuntu, which are of the proper nature to have user-friendly, shiny, graphical installers. I'm not sure whether Gentoo itself is realizing what it is more, or whether I just understand it better and have a clear idea of what to expect. It seems to me that Gentoo has improved significantly, but that could be based merely on my own rocky start with it, which might have been due to some minor bug or misunderstanding.

A few years later, I installed Ubuntu again, but realized that it lacked support for my sound card. I learned that I needed to significantly reconfigure my kernel to make it work, found instructions on how to do this, and did it successfully. Well, it was somewhat successful; my sound card worked, but now my wireless card didn't! I decided that if I was going to spend lots of time tweaking it just to make my sound card work, I might as well just use Gentoo.

I've tried Ubuntu a few times since then (on flash drives and virtual machines), but it's just too user-friendly-ish and simplistic, but it doesn't really seem qualitatively better. I've also tried FreeBSD, OpenSuse, OpenSolaris, Puppy, DSL, and others, but I'm the sort of person who doesn't mind spending an extra fifteen minutes or half hour to tweak something, and Gentoo makes that straightforward for me.

I'll know that Gentoo is dying for me when I can't figure out how to configure it in a way that I like, or something essential just won't work as well as I want it to. Then, though, it might be fine for other people. I suppose that people will know that it is dead when people stop using these forums and cease installing or using it on their computers. I doubt that will ever happen, though.
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dirkfanick · Posted: Thu May 12, 2011 2:16 pm Post subject:

alveraan · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2004 Posts: 59 Location: Belgium

The only reason why I changed my desktop distro from gentoo to arch a few months ago was because I wanted a simple and fast bleeding edge system.

Arch has all the newest packages, is nevertheless pretty stable, extremely simple to use and configure (if you're not afraid of the command line) and has good documentation and a good community. Gentoo has all that too, but is not bleeding edge anymore. A few years ago, Gentoo still was, so I guess the application range has changed, and it's now more like debian stable. It is also much more customizable than arch, being a source based distribution with the great use flags concept.

So for my two servers, gentoo (hardened) remains the distro of choice.

Gentoo is still a fine distro and it seems far from being dead.
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amightywind · Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 3:21 pm Post subject: Gentoo slouching to chaos

I must agree Gentoo is in decline. The recent switch to the new baselayout program trashed my system. And after after a routine emerge world && revdep-rebuild my python 2.6 was gone! sweet. System decapitated. Over the past 2 years the quarterly updates have been getting worse and worse. The latest baselayout/openrc rollout stunk. The old one was great. It worked reliably. My system never shutdown correctly after openrc was installed. Yes, wise asses I followed the migration guide. It not joins the four inch stack of previous ones. Who tested it? How many users and for how long? There is not a lot of transparency. On top of that the priesthood rolled out yet another massive X upgrade 2 days after the openrc fiasco. Nice timing fellas. I have had to emerge Chromium 3 time in the last month. Who wants to spend 50% of their computer time trying to keep their system alive?

Here are the major problems with Gentoo as I see them:

1. Python based emerge is a complete disaster. Why would I want a nice minimal source based system and be required to use that junkyard? What are you retards thinking?

2. The quality of ebuilds has been declining as the number of packages increases exponentially. I just want a gnome desktop than runs and a gcc that works.

3. Gentoo quality control sucks. Who is testing what to what standard?

After keeping a Gentoo system alive since 2004 I bid adieu. This distro is off the rails. I will move on to arch or fedora or something. My computer is already thanking me that it won't have to compile all night again to produce a broken system. The first thing I will do is remove python...
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aCOSwt · Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 3:56 pm Post subject: Re: Gentoo slouching to chaos

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amightywind · Posted: Sun May 15, 2011 7:00 pm Post subject:

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dalek · Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 12:41 am Post subject:

Doing the openrc upgrade was a breeze for me and most others on the mailing list didn't have any problems.

On python, I learned a LONG time ago to run python-updater after a python update. If you don't do that, it's the fault of the person in the chair typing on the keyboard or not typing in this case.

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cach0rr0 · Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 1:41 am Post subject:

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dalek · Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 12:39 pm Post subject:

I have always described Gentoo this way. Gentoo is Linux From Scratch with a nice package handler. I think Gentoo is about as close to source as you can get other than LFS. Key word "about". There may be another one I have not heard of.

I been using Gentoo since about 2003. You can look to the left to see that. I signed up here and within a couple days, I had Gentoo running. I must add, other than some updates that were tricky, expat being one of them, I have had no problems with mine. When there is a upgrade that is tricky, they post a guide and walk you through it. Then just to make things better, they added the news item with eselect. That way even if you use Gentoo but don't use the mailing lists, forums or keep up with things in other ways, you still know what is coming and can be aware of the update process.

I used Mandrake before I switched to Gentoo. I can't even think of one reason I would switch back or to anything else.

LONG LIVE GENTOO !!!

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