Other distros to compare with Gentoo ?

Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 345

Hello.

Ok... I need to change my distro. Yes I know what you're going to say, but please listen to my arguments

I love Gentoo since it taught me all I know about Linux.

First - I've been using Gentoo for 4 years and I have no reference to other distros and should get more experience.
Second - I love customization, writing my own scripts etc., but this is taking too much time. Especially when I have to spend 4 hours after every update to fix stuff.
Third - I want my system to be more flexible - so most things will work out of the box.
Fourth - Even if other distros fail to satisfy me, I'll love Gentoo more.

Could you give me your suggestions on other distros ? I was thinking about:

Sabayon - based on Gentoo
Arch - Good documentation, second only to Gentoo
Debian - the classic (would be useful to know it, since it is commercially popular)
Fedora - popular and kinda works

PS as of a DE - I think I'll stay with fluxbox, or maybe something light like LXDE

disi · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 8:47 pm Post subject:

for a distro with all the latest packages - check http://oswatershed.org
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Kollin

illuminated · n00b Joined: 28 Dec 2010 Posts: 48

The truth is that after some time, you will probably start missing it

Jaglover · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:49 pm Post subject:

IF (note capitals) Gentoo was to disappear overnight I'd switch to Debian. And start learning Arch the same time. But Gentoo is here, so I'm not going anywhere.

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sera · Developer Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 961 Location: CEST

Looking at Sabayons ebuilds they do not know what they are doing. -> Off the list
Ubuntu, ugly hack, broken in many ways - no chance to get happy with it. -> Off the list
Funtoo, fungentoo? friendlygentoo? - I don't get the point.
ReadHat, I prefer Debian, barely used it since the split RHEL/Fedora so; was my first distro btw.
SUSE, haven't used it in years, not my favorite.

Debian, robust and well supported binary distribution.
Exherbo, an alternative source based distribution, more demanding than Gentoo but quite a few nice concepts.
PCLinuxOS, the one you can recommend your mother

Personally, I stick with Gentoo as my primary OS for at least a few more years.

gentoo-dev · Apprentice Joined: 24 Jan 2006 Posts: 172

I ditched Gentoo for Ubuntu on machines I absolutely do not want to tinker and Arch otherwise.
Ubuntu 10.4 LTS on 2 laptops and 11.04 on a desktop just keeps on working.
Arch machines have been updated blindly regularly for the past 2 years and no update has ever failed. I could not say the same about Gentoo.

Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 345

Thank you for your replies

So for me it's down to a duel between Arch and Debian. I'd be glad to hear your opinions on these two.

And also... It would be nice to see a liveCD first... I'll be on the lookout for those.

likewhoa · Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 12:12 pm Post subject:

you may leave Gentoo for others, but you'll eventually come back because no other can satisfy you like Larry the Cow can

sera · Developer Joined: 29 Feb 2008 Posts: 961 Location: CEST

If it's down to just two I recommend to test out both and make a decision based on your findings. Nothing beats first hand experience.

kimmie · Guru Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 531 Location: Australia

If it's a server and you want more experience, try FreeBSD instead of linux.

aCOSwt

kimmie · Guru Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 531 Location: Australia

aCOSwt, you're doing my head in. If a tree falls in the forest, and it falls on my head... owww! Shhh, did you hear something?

aCOSwt · Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 2:38 pm Post subject:

merlinBSD · Posted: Tue Jun 28, 2011 3:05 pm Post subject:

been away from gentoo for 5 years. Using arch since. Its a viable alternative. Always back and forth checking gentoo documentation and forums though

The truth is there are more similar things than things than separe them... Could be applied to any linuxes but even more accurate between arch and gentoo.
Reality is arch is much easier to maintain. It does break but it is a much simpler design. Gentoo metadistro style with its use flags is both its advantage and weakness.Use flags are nice but they can be confusing for people missing experience. Using arch you get used to just compile programs to add features (by configure script instead of use flags) which were not present in the distro binaries. Its an easy straitforward task though thanks to ABS and AUR. However arch has no stable realease and its kinda running ~x86 at all time (don't know what its like know but you hardly could run a pure ~x86 before on gentoo).

Not trying to bash gentoo at all, I wouldn't know half the stuff i know about linux if I didnt use gentoo before(used it for 4 years solely). But I do not have the same time available as I use to years ago when I was at uni...
Been thinking of reinstalling gentoo one day to see where it has gone

Gentoo is the most customizable distro around for sure, as for usable there are many

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Trog Dog · Apprentice Joined: 04 Aug 2007 Posts: 282

Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 345

ok... good that the discussion stopped on the edge of turning into a flame war

Those ironic comments were really unnecessary.

The thing is, I know Gentoo is great, but I have no point of reference. I just want to test something else to see how it feels. And the next time someone asks me why do i use Gentoo, I'll be able to give him a comparison to another distro.

One remark was indeed valid.
By flexible I mean that more things would work out of the box - I know that's only my definition but whatever. The thing is, I often work with unusual equipment - µC programmers, FPGA programmers, Voltage sensors and similar. My kernel is made manually and it's a real pain in the a** when I have to recompile it to include a driver for a specific device especially when I don't have much time to do so. So my solution would be a more modular kernel (I could even build all external device drivers as modules - and overkill, but if it works, I'll be happy).

Raptor85 · Apprentice Joined: 29 Dec 2007 Posts: 208

use at your own risk of course, but if you need to simply compile a new module, and you're sure there's no reason to compile the rest of the kernel, you can simply do "make modules && make modules_install" after setting it to "m" in .config , generally only takes a few seconds (depends on the module you're building)

Randy Andy · l33t Joined: 19 Jun 2007 Posts: 872 Location: /dev/koelsch

Dark Foo · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 8:56 am Post subject:

try slackware or freebsd
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depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 2156

On a similar note, I need to update my daughter's machine. Years back I started her out on Ubuntu 7.04, walking through the updates until last year 9.04 went out of service. The Ubuntu 10.04 install failed on her machine, so I moved her to Fedora Core 13. That went out of service a few weeks ago, so I really need to get her moved to something supported. More than that, I need to get her on something she can support on her own, coming to Dad only for the major stuff.

I think I understand now why the Ubuntu 10.04 install failed... I used gparted to make a backup copy of her /home partition, and it copied the UUID along with the contents. Ubuntu seems to mount by UUID, so it probably saw duplicate "unique" IDs and got into a snit. When I installed FC13 for her, I did the advanced partitioning option, which meant that I specified /home as /dev/sdaX, and sidestepped the non-unique UUID issue. Now that I write this out, this seems like a bug with gparted. It should have at least had some sort of dialog warning about duplicate UUIDs and given several options about what to do.

Anyway, at this point I'm pretty sure I could get Ubuntu 10.04 installed, but I'm not sure I'm happy with their direction, Unity, and all that. My daughter's not that happy with Fedora Core because it won't do libdvdcss without a lot of intervention, and we never got around to it, so she could never play DVDs.

Then again, I really like rolling distributions - it's one of my favorite features of Gentoo. So I'm wondering what "simple distros" are rolling - today I saw something on LWN about Mint being one, and I've heard other good things about it. I'm under the impression that Arch is for "impatient Gentoo users" who can sacrifice USE flags for not waiting to compile.
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Dark Foo · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 3:42 pm Post subject:

http://www.pcbsd.org/pc-bsd/desktop - might be what you are looking for
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I know 43 ways to kill with a SKITTLE, so taste my rainbow bitch.

depontius · Advocate Joined: 05 May 2004 Posts: 2156

I think for the moment I'd rather stick with some sort of Linux for her. Years back I considered moving my servers to OpenBSD. After some thought, I figured I'd be better off not dividing my admin learning, not having to become familiar with 2 somewhat dissimilar systems. Even now it's a pain in the neck answering my mother's Windows questions. I used to have her running Linux, but her situation changed and she was going to become more dependent on others, so I figured Windows would work better in that regard.
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Dark Foo · Posted: Thu Jul 14, 2011 6:21 pm Post subject:

Closest thing i have found to gentoo, i mean it has "the" ports tree

, I look at it as its the ubuntu of the BDS world :p
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Gabriel_Blake · Guru Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 345

Randy Andy Thank you very much for your post