NooB question: Gentoo vs. Debian?

tycheung · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 43

Sorry for the cliched question, but I am trying to decide which distro to install (box will be primarily a backup fileserver, a platform for playing around with linux, some scientific-related programming, and games via dual boot with WinXP), and wanted to do an objective comparison of the two. From what I gather, gentoo's advantages are:

-source based, allowing compilation of packages with specific CPU optimizations, allowing for faster perf. on newer processors such as athlonXP/P4

-portage

-more customizability in how things are set up and what gets installed

-quicker ports of software, i.e. newer versions of various packages get updated sooner

The cons are it may not be as stable, and software outside the portage system do not compile as straightforwardly as other systems.

Debian's advantages seem to be:

-more users/developers working on it
-binary vs. source distribution, enabling faster installs?
-more stable due to more conservative approach

while on the minus side, latest version of packages may not come thru as fast, and performance may be slower as the packages are precompiled as generic i386 binaries.

Would this be an accurate summation? What I am really curious about is, how much slower is Debian than Gentoo, and how much more unstable is gentoo than debian? the other source of worry is that the last time I tried gentoo out (1.4_rc1), a lot of emerges ground to a halt with the computer frozen and constant drive access/thrashing. I assumed this might have been due to gcc running up to the limits of available (128 mb at the time..) RAM and was constantly paging out to swap. Thus, I am afraid some time in the future, as software gets more complex, portage may no longer work on my system. Is this a realistic fear or was there something buggered with my particular install and easily fixed?

any insight would be helpful,

Thanks,

T

AJM · Posted: Mon Feb 03, 2003 10:38 am Post subject:

Your summary is about right. In your situation, I think either Gentoo or Debian would be fine. One thing though, if you're dual booting and running another OS a lot of the time, you can find your gentoo install rapidly getting out of date, requiring a good deal of CPU time to catch up. I presume you now have more than 128Mb RAM?

I have to say, I'm not sure that you'll notice ANY performance difference between the two - for me, the benefits of Gentoo are mostly with Portage's package management (esp. as it's a piece of cake to knock up an ebuild to install wierd packages "properly") and the clean nature of the config files. Not forgetting the superb documentation...

Having said that, I run both - servers are Debian stable virtually ZERO hassle to look after), and our number-crunching workstations are gentoo because of (1) GCC 3 (2) the ability to install Intel's Fortran compiler with one command and (3) nicely up-to-date packages for image manipulation etc.

The exception to this is our new laptop, which is running Debian testing/unstable via a Knoppix install, because it was such an incredibly quick way of getting a fully-loaded desktop install with virtually no configuration!

Summing up, stability wise, Gentoo is probably roughly on a par with Debian testing - take your pick, they're both very good distros but I think you'll find the Gentoo "community" much more approachable!

AJ

The Ennead

I'm biased but will try to be as objective as I can. I've tried both and settled with Gentoo so that would be my suggestion. You don't mention your hardware but for me that was one of the biggest reasons for going with Gentoo.

The latest Debian is just too far out of date to support the hardware I have so any install is a major undertaking to bring it up to par. In that sense i'd rather go with something that is 'right' straight out of the box, rather than install something and then spend hours/ a couple of days patching things. Debian woody runs the 2.4.18bf24 kernel and that's not enough to support my last motherboard (a7v333) let alone my current one (a7v8x). My fault for not working things out beforehand I guess, but the first thing I did when I finished installing was to recompile the kernel to get support. After that I used APT to bring the system up to Sarge and give me a newish enviroment. I then tried installing Nvidia drivers and got nowhere until I did another kernel recompile to bring that into sync with the rest of the system.

Enough of my problems, in short, if your hardware is newish then save yourself a lot of hassle and go Gentoo, other than that i'd agree with the post above.

tycheung · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2002 Posts: 43

OK. I might just go with gentoo for now; if my computer starts to choke on emerges, I'll just install apt, or reinstall with a binary distro. i have 512 now, so that should hold for a while.

Another thing - a friend of mine seems to be pushing me to install FreeBSD, claiming it's "architecturally" superior to linux, but won't elaborate more. From what I understand, it's a very stable OS with somewhat better networking and kernel but the software choices and hardware support is much more limited, other than that, I couldn't really find much more info. Would there be any advantage in using FreeBSD vs. linux or should I not bother?

elzbal · Posted: Tue Feb 04, 2003 10:22 pm Post subject:

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Whats the difference between gentoo and debian?
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