Gentoo Linux on Linux Insider

[ak47gen]

So apparently Linux Insider did an article on Gentoo. They talked about the two things Gentoo is known for; Speed and Customization. Though as a Gentoo user, I rarely find speed a driving factor anymore. Yes ZOMG CFLAGS...may help a little on speed (though pretty much march=native makes everything easy), you are not getting much of a night and day approach. Though what I do find helpful is the fact I can set my use flags to stricken applications. Maybe I want Samba, but I don't want printing support (CUPS), well that is one less thing I have to worry about and have to patch. The two driving factors for Gentoo for me are. Portage is very huge and I rarely have issues finding what I want in it. The other factor is system hardening. I can engineer my system from kernel up. I don't have to worry about patching or securing things I don't have to have. I also can implement PaX and other security features that address attacks which most distro's are vulnerable. I am not sure who else uses Gentoo for that reason.

http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/For-Gentoo-Linux-Initiates-Iron-Penguin-May-Be-Too-Heavy-81207.html

[The Doctor]

I don't want to sound too harsh, but it doesn't sound like the person writing the review actually understands what Gentoo is or what it intends to be. For example, it references KDE as the default desktop and makes porthole sound like it is the way to manage packages.

I would peg the 'killer app' of Gentoo for me is choice. I can choose not to use KDE, Gnome, udev, etc. The review doesn't even mention this.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[ak47gen]

I agree with what you said. Also I didn't even know about porthole until I read the article. Though I think the article is confusing itself with the Live CD gentoo that was released, VS Gentoo as a whole. Either way I am glad they didn't mention funroll-loops.

[Chiitoo]

Heh.


It definitely should have been titled a review of the LiveDVD instead.

Even if speaking of only the LiveDVD, there are things not quite right with it. For one, a mere peek at the description would tell that KDE is not the only DE even for the LiveDVD, nor is Chromium the only available web-browser:

[Fitzcarraldo]

Well, it was good to see Gentoo mentioned in the wider 'press', but it was a poor review. Tinkering for a few minutes with the LiveDVD does not constitute a decent examination of the OS. I don't think he even realised that the DM menu of the LiveDVD allows the user to select either E16, Fluxbox, GNOME, GNOME Classic, LXQt, Openbox, WindowMaker, XSession, Xfce4 or i3 instead of KDE.
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Clevo W230SS: amd64, VIDEO_CARDS="intel modesetting nvidia".
Compal NBLB2: ~amd64, xf86-video-ati. Dual boot Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
OpenRC udev elogind & KDE on both.
Fitzcarraldo's blog

[Perfect Gentleman]

One of the shittiest review ever written. That journalist is as dumb as hell.

[i92guboj]

Trying to write a review for such kind of OS (not just Gentoo, but FreeBSD, LFS...) is pretentious enough so that I won't even waste my time reading it. I guess it's something around the lines of "oh yes, I move my mouse and write a couple of commands in a term". That usually works in mainstream distros because, well, all people care about is how the UI looks and feels, which on the other side is quite a pointless subject in Gentoo.

The closest thing to a "Gentoo review" you'll ever get is the Gentoo Handbook, the rest is just that: someone trying to convince people who gon't give a shit about what they are being told that he's the true father of Luke Skywalker

[steveL]