What attracted you to Gentoo?

songpenguin · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 8:45 am Post subject: What attracted you to Gentoo?

Why did you switch to Gentoo? There has to be a reason why the Gentoo community is growing so fast and I thought it woud be interesting to run a poll and see why everyone is abandoning their old distros.

Personally I abandoned my old distro (slackware) because I got board with it and wanted a change. Decided I wanted a challenge!

I would love to hear your reasoning.

Thanks,
Songpenguin
_________________
Bill, I don't do Windows. --Ray Bradbury
You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down. --Ray Bradbury

songpenguin · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 8:55 am Post subject:

Gahh! I can not believe I forgot a community option. *Slaps himself*. Oh well, make that the "other" option minus the comment. :-/

Cheers,
Songpenguin
_________________
Bill, I don't do Windows. --Ray Bradbury
You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down. --Ray Bradbury

ToeiRei · Veteran Joined: 03 Jan 2005 Posts: 1113 Location: Austria

My reason: optimisation and tweaking until the doc comes round
Rei
_________________
Blog | btrfs | Please stand by - The mailer daemon is busy burning your messages in hell...

mark_alec · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:28 am Post subject:

I came over to gentoo because I was looking for an up to date distrobution which would enable me to upgrade without ever reinstalling. I narrowed it down to gentoo and debian but gentoo won out because it had far better installation documentation.

Archangel1 · Veteran Joined: 21 Apr 2004 Posts: 1212 Location: Work

Everything else is too hard...

Other distros or OS's seem easy until something comes along that their pretty GUI doesn't deal with, then they're just a pain in the ass. Gentoo just seems more logical - like it's actually been designed by a sane human being. I need to look no further than the runlevel system for an example.
_________________
What are you, stupid?

Naib · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:20 pm Post subject:

Where is the "RPM Dependancy-Hell" option.

After royally screwing up my Mandrake box cause the latest version was released abt 2weeks before the new GNOME and I wanted the new GNOME, i reinstalled abt 3 or 4 times and each time really messing it up in trying to install some make-shift RPM's

Tried via source and the RPM database got confused.
Heard abt Gentoo being a bit closer to cutting edge - not looked back since
_________________

pablo_supertux · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:30 pm Post subject:

I had three choices but I could only take one.

My reasons:

- Portage
- USE Flags
- Friend's recommendation
_________________
A! Elbereth Gilthoniel!
silivren penna míriel
o menel aglar elenath,
Gilthoniel, A! Elbereth!

feivelda · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 12:43 pm Post subject:

I want to get really deep in linux.
I tried Suse for a week or two, but there wasn't enough to do by yourself.
After that I tried Fedora Core 2 and 3 and that was really fun.
But then I tried Gentoo to get deep into linux.
This is 6 months ago. I killed my system 2 times in this 6 months but every
new install was a bit more learning for me.

And now all my friends who have also linux asks me how to solve there problems :lol:

The only greater experience than Gentoo would be Linux from Scratch

Headrush · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 1:14 pm Post subject:

Ma3oxuct · Guru Joined: 18 Apr 2003 Posts: 520

I simply wanted to be in control of customizing my system as much as possible.

andrewd18 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:04 pm Post subject:

Portage ++ Geek ++ Friend ++ SPEEEEEED.

But I voted for Portage because I like the whole build from source thing. No more Dependancy Hell.

~~ Andrew D.
_________________
Keep Your Toolchain Stable! - emwrap.sh

There's no place like ::1

Headrush · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:12 pm Post subject:

andyfraser33 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 7:54 pm Post subject:

I really like the "rolling" updates and like having fairly up to date software. The only other distro I know of that can do this is Debian but where I can choose to run stable Gentoo I had to choose Debian unstable when I was using that. Although Gentoo stable has had a few hiccups, Debian unstable has the potential to introduce major problems. I was playing around with Debian the weekend before last and it appears that KDE is not installable in unstable at the moment.

Then there's USE flags. My web server, running Gentoo, also runs MySQL but I have MS SQL Server on a Windows server and PostgreSQL on another Gentoo server. I wanted to be able to access all three database servers from PHP on the web server. Debian can do this because they split up PHP into separate modules but I don't know of any other distro that can without having to manually recompile PHP. That's just one example of where USE flags are so great. I switched my servers to Gentoo because I get much better network performance than I did with Debian.

Then there's Portage. A lot of people rave about APT and I have to admit that APT is truly excellent but once I'd become used to Portage I found I preferred it.

Gentoo has it's own take on the init and runlevel systems they're incredibly easy to understand and use. I really like that.

Last but not least, there's the excellent community.

I don't use Gentoo for speed. I use conservative CFLAGS but it's nice to know that, where possible, I'm using all the features of my CPU. Gentoo does feel faster and more responsive than Debian and Mandrake.
_________________
Andy.

episode96 · Apprentice Joined: 08 Mar 2004 Posts: 173

I've voted "other" since I find multiple reasons:

* Installation: I don't like installers which take control and decisions out of my hands.
* Portage: easy to maintain, up to date packages, and everything I need is there.
* Great docs, and great support forum

I also like USE flags and building from source, but I could live without that. What I listed above is what really matters to me.
_________________
Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

Omega21 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 9:05 pm Post subject:

I myself like both Portage, and the Geek Factor.
I cant imagine installing anything without the emerge command!

_________________
iMac G4 1GHz :: q6600 //2x 500GB//2GB RAM//8600GT//Gentoo :: MacBook Pro//2.53GHz

m0p · Apprentice Joined: 20 Jun 2005 Posts: 205 Location: en_GB

Hands on approach, speed, portage, educational, documentation, and geek factor!

quag7 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 10:21 pm Post subject:

I had been using Mandrake for several months as my first distribution, and I was having trouble learning how things worked (I was new to Linux). The GUI wizards were excellent for getting a complete beginner started but when problems would arise (and they did), I wasn't sure where to look, or how to go about learning how to learn, so to speak.

Then I read an article on Gentoo, probably on Slashdot, which indicated that Gentoo was more difficult than string theory and that only like 2 people in the whole world could install it and that several others had tried and had wound up clinically insane, having gouged out their eyeballs. The article said that there was no way anyone other than PhDs in computer science could possibly install Gentoo Linux without losing their mind or dying in the process, but that it was a manual install, and that you could see, at a high level, all the different pieces that went into building a Linux system. And if you succeeded, people would worship you as a god and kneel down in tribute before you, bearing gifts of rare spices and gold.

Which is what I thought I needed. Well not the god thing, though I wouldn't turn it down, but the educational experience.

Anyway, though this reputation still persists a little bit throughout certain parts of the internet, it really was pretty simple, and I did "learn how to learn" at very least. The locations and names of config files became clear, and the idea that configuring and compiling your own kernel was not as hard as landing someone on the moon went a long way to making me fairly fearless about messing around, and as we all know, it's through messing around that you educate yourself.

And so, as is the case (I suspect) with most peoples preferences, momentum and familiarity is why I stick with Gentoo to this day. I have 2 other machines here running Debian and one running FreeBSD, but most of what I know about *them*, I know from having run Gentoo (at least, I have an inkling of where to begin to troubleshoot or configure something because of Gentoo). I appreciate their respective virtues, but I still run Gentoo on the desktop I'm typing this on.

But all of this is why I am still of the minority opinion that, in fact, Gentoo is a superb beginner's distribution. It will familiarize you with all of the basics (init scripts, kernel configuration, inserting and removing modules, fstab, crontab, partitioning etc.) enough that once you learn those things you can turn around and easily apply them to any other distribution. (Accordingly, I'm not particularly interested in a graphical installer but to each his own.)

I suppose you could learn these things from another distribution but I think Gentoo is an excellent Linux primer, or bootcamp, or "Linux essentials" course when you're a beginner, coming from Windows, and have no idea how Linux works. It's still fairly high level (Portage and helper scripts still take care of a lot of the more unpleasant tasks) but it covers the basics at any rate and gets your started. I hit a sort of brick wall with Mandrake, but Gentoo's esoteric (to me) bottom is, though deep, quite accessible.

Thanks, Gentoo!
_________________
http://www.dataswamp.net

russianpirate · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 10:48 pm Post subject:

Portage and geek factor cause I can say im more 1337 than my windows friends

atrus123 · Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2005 11:58 pm Post subject:

Well a friend first mentioned it to me back when I was just starting Linux (only a few months ago). I tried it, couldn't get it installed, and found out later it wouldn't install because I had bad RAM in the PC.

In the meanwhile, I'd also heard about Ubuntu and decided to install that instead once the ram issue had been fixed.

I love Ubuntu. It's the perfect first distro, and I fell in love with Linux thanks to it.

Enter my new laptop and Ubuntu doesn't work as well as I'd hoped. It's too slow.. unbearably slow in fact, and so I decide to try some other distros:

Fedora - works alright. Anaconda installer crashes several times but finally takes. Doesn't detect sound or video. Locks up from time to time.

SuSE - works a bit better. Detects sound but not video. No lock-ups. ... But I hate KDE, and since everything is optimized for KDE, I toss it.

Slamd64 - nice, clean, fast distro, but difficult to work with, considering my lack of linux knowledge.

Mandrake - Again, I dislike KDE. Also fails to pick up my sound.

So to return to my diatribe, I finally decided to give Gentoo a shot, and much to my amazement, it takes.. but then crashes, so I reinstall it, this time it works a bit better until more kernel sync errors, and finally it takes flawlessly (I'm sure all thanks to my kernel choices), and I haven't looked back since. I love Gentoo because I actually know (or am learning how to) deal with issues that might come up, and as a result I'm learning more about Linux as a whole. I have a sense of the gui being but one program of many, rather than serving as Linux itself.

I still love Ubuntu, and I'll continue using it on my desktop, but on the laptop, my heart belongs to Gentoo

J.

Q-collective · Veteran Joined: 22 Mar 2004 Posts: 1923

The hands on approach: simplicity, straight to the point. Love that.

songpenguin · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 1:18 am Post subject:

tutaepaki · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 1:20 am Post subject:

I switched from RedHat in that space between version 9 and Fedora. I was looking for LFS and found Gentoo instead.
I found it perfect since, because I'm always adding/removing packages etc and portage just makes that so easy.

yakapiece · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 3:09 am Post subject:

I've spent years using other distributions and it comes down to Gentoo actually working, meaning that I don't worry about dependencies - compiling with the wrong options, etc.

I feel like its the retired life

Or maybe its about time a distro made my life easier.

DaveArb · Guru Joined: 29 Apr 2004 Posts: 510 Location: Texas, USA

loki99 · Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2005 7:18 pm Post subject:

The main reason for me to switch to Gentoo was, that it allowed me to build a system stripped down to he necessities and the apps I wanted. And then I found out how much fun it is to be able to that.

Portage is just fantastic, the community support is matchless and pampering my system never seemed to be so easy.

Last but not least I'd like to mention stability. Gentoo is the first OS that stayed on my box over a year without reinstalling. Everything just works and when something does go wrong, I have a fair chance to find out what the prob is about and how I can fix it.