What attracted you to Gentoo?

southpaw · Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 1:55 am Post subject:

Although Portage isn't perfect I like the concept a lot. I also like the extent of customization that comes with using Gentoo on top of that it's definitely the fastest distro I've used and most importantly, I've learned more about Linux and Unix using Gentoo than any other distro...

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Section_8 · l33t Joined: 22 May 2004 Posts: 627

I've been on gentoo a little over a year. I switched from mandrake/suse because I got tired of having to reinstall from scratch to keep my system up to date.

portage is wonderful.

shickapooka800 · Guru Joined: 05 Dec 2004 Posts: 304 Location: no

honestly, this forum.
if you check out other distro oriented forums, they aren't nearly as full of information, both useful and useless. It seems to me that the mentality and disposition of the gentoo group as a whole is rather diverse and opninionated, which makes for lots of entertainment while you explore the billions of old posts looking for any thing you could ever imagine concering linux or otherwise. never have I com accross an issue that wasn't in some way touched on by an old post -- ergo my low post count. RTFM should just turn into RTFF (read the fucking forums).

dudcog · n00b Joined: 12 Mar 2005 Posts: 2 Location: Berkshire, UK

I started with Slackware in 1998 - which I liked at the time - I could never find many packages for it but simply downloading source code and ./confiugre ; make seemed to work well. After one of the disks crashed I tried Debian (after a friend recommended it). I liked Debian on the whole but after a while the politics got anoying (if I want politics I could simply step outside the server room at work and listen to everybody bitch and moan at/to each other).
I tried FreeBSD next. I loved FreeBSD - I liked the way I could choose between packages or ports depending on how long I wanted to wait before things got installed. Unfortunately FreeBSD didn't like my new hardware so I gave Fedora core 3 a go. I never felt comfortable with FC though so it wasn't long before I was looking to try another distro when 2 things happened.
1 - I was ill and away from work and bored.
2 - I saw Larry the Cow

I now have a system that I'm happy with, I know exactly what's installed on it and I can tweak it exactly how I like.

aproan · Guru Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 415

Larry the Cow!

LordKenTheGreat · n00b Joined: 29 Jan 2007 Posts: 11

I switched to Gentoo to further my knowledge of Linux. After playing around on a free shell, I finally decided to install Gentoo myself. The documentation is extremely helpful and I consider myself a proud Gentoo user.

aidanjt · Posted: Fri Feb 02, 2007 3:10 am Post subject:

Defiantly portage, it was getting to the point where I was hand compiling all my packages anyway, why not have a package manager that takes the grunt work out for me?

Spector · n00b Joined: 10 Nov 2005 Posts: 2

I began in the linux world with Suse 7.1, it was great ... right until I started to work with it. Sometimes YaST didn't apply the options I wanted and when I changed the config files after hours reading howtos it restored its options on reboot, apps wouldn't work, etc. It got to my nerves. Then I tried Debian, apt is really great... but it didn't feel "right" to me. Also, the stable branch was too outdated and on testing some apps wouldn't even start after install. Then I heard of some Gentoo distro wich was everything I had ever dreamed of: no stupid and limited wizards, everything completely personalized, manual (and absolute) control over everything, optimization and a great comunity.
Getting Gentoo to run for the first time was quite painful (I was still a complete noob by then), but this forum had the answer for everything I ever needed. Although sometimes an app can give some compilation problems, once you get something running it works perfectly no matter what and portage doesn't mess with it unless you want it to. I like my computer doing what I want, not the other way arround.

Linux is great, and Gentoo with portage is the way to go for anyone who wants to learn about and work with computers.

P.D.: sorry for my english.

Dralnu · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2006 Posts: 1919

Speed. I switched from SuSe 9.3, which was as slow a honey above the artic circle. Now, just about anything else seems like its at a crawl.
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Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

For me it was the rolling updates.

I was previously using a seriously hacked-up Slackware/LFS hybrid (Core Slackware packages, everything else from KDE up manually 'make'd)

But I got tired of basically re-installing everything from scratch everytime a new version of Slackware came out (Like Windows, it is not usually a good idea to blindly 'update' a distro by installing over your old one).

It doesn't always work - Going from 2005.2 to 2006.1 pretty much broke everything, and I ended up having to do a from-scratch-then-hand-copy install, which brought back unwanted memories of my Slackware days

But by and large it's worked great - Being able to send portage off to go update X and KDE without worrying about the nitty gritty is great.

It's not all win - The structure Gentoo imposes on me means lots of hoop-jumping if I want to configure the system in a way that it won't break - The config scripts and layout is a LOT more complicated than in Slackware (Which has a BSD-style thing going rather than a System V), but it's a lot saner than a lot of other distros I've tried.
I do miss being able to ./configure stuff at will (because it does all sorts of scary crap to the system) so I end up having to jump through more hoops making my own ebuilds so the emerges do what I want them to do.

The fact that I can do that is really damned cool 'tho.

runningwithscissors · Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 8:28 am Post subject:

Colours in the shell!

johnnyboyro · n00b Joined: 19 Sep 2003 Posts: 57 Location: Iasi, Romania

I've started messing with Gentoo just because I was bored on RedHat stuff and wanted to try something else ... I went thru Mandrake, Suse, Debian, and others, and finally got to try Gentoo.
At first I was thinking the it is a great idea to try it 'cause it will help me understand the insides of a Linux system. After a while, getting used with configure scripts and tools on Gentoo, I've observed that, in Gentoo, even if it takes longer to install due to compilation time and so, the things just works. That is compared to other distros, which are perfect for a trivial user, but are a big headache when it comes to do anything custom, not already considered by the distro makers.
There are 3 or 4 years now ... I don't even remember, like I've used it since forever ...
During this time I did tried to go back on other distros ... but I just did not liked them at all anymore ...
Having to choose one reason from the list was a difficult task; I've chosen the hands on approach, but I think that pretty much all of the options are very important to me to keep gentooing ...

enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

Chicks dig my rice-a-roni-rig.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2007 7:13 pm Post subject:

Hard to make a vote, it's both portage and USE= that I like.

I started with tarball distributions (SLS 1.03 and Slackware 1.1) and they worked, it saved a lot of effort searching for individual tools to put together a system. However it had no update system and was really slopping in handling package removal.

Redhat 4.0 with RPM solved the package system, now I can install and remove easily. I stuck with RH through Redhat 9, which eventually also solved the update system.

But when Redhat stopped their support for non-commercial use, it's time to go find something once more. I did like the idea of getting source to put the system together. After a bit of holdback of thinking of having to compile *everything*, I warmed up to Gentoo's portage, as no other system were complete with regular updates, and with source code - portage wins. (Having a slightly faster machine helps.)

But, coupled with USE= flags to tailor machines as well as individual packages, this got me sold. Perfect system for me, though it does have its drawbacks (see "enterprise acceptance" thread for details)...
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sLumpia · Posted: Thu Oct 25, 2007 8:53 pm Post subject:

wow, there are actually people vote for Distrowatch.com rank

d2_racing · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 2:22 am Post subject:

monsm · Guru Joined: 26 Sep 2007 Posts: 467 Location: London, UK

I came mostly for speed. I have an AMD XP 3200+ (32 bit one), but running Beryl in Fedora 7 became very slow on this machine.
I was looking through at lots of distros, and compiling everything should speed up execution, although not installation in the short term.
In the longer term, I guess, since it saves me from re-installing, it might save frustration at least.

I have updated to Gnome 2.20 now, looks very nice, so Compiz-fusion is next

I only found out how good Portage is after I installed. Actually another thing that made me choose Gentoo was documentation. I found myself using Gentoo documentation when I was still running Fedora.

d2_racing · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 11:51 am Post subject:

I'm so glad that I'm running Gentoo, because I learned a lot since may 2005. In fact, this distribution made me a better Linux user

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 12:02 pm Post subject:

Speed and highly pulling away unneeded packages. Also gaming: tremulous, wolfenstein, supertux, frozen-bubble, smc, funnyboat, pysol, wesnoth, supertuxcart, freeciv, alienarena and much more.

I don*t like full featured desktop meta packages like gnome or kde. I only have 30 % of gnome installed and everything works fine. I like the concept to be up to date with the software.

xahodo · Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2007 1:30 pm Post subject:

Well, I love the amount of control you get. Portage, the use flags and setting your own cflags along with not having to enter each and every command to compile package x does it for me. Before gentoo I had an LFS system (good learning experience), but I was too lazy to keep it up-to-date. A package manager definitely comes in handy, but rpm nor apt won't cut it for me.

spindle · Apprentice Joined: 01 Dec 2003 Posts: 245

I love a lot a things about Gentoo. Mostly that it's so transparent how things work and simple to configure when you take the time to look.

I've run this desktop install on this machine since late 2003 but it was on a different machine originally. When I upgraded my hardware to a faster newer Intel chip, I got a whole new system to support it. I then put my hard drive from the old box into the new one, and it booted flawlessly the first time. I was in shock and in awe. But I was also confident that if there was a problem I could fix it and get my old system back up and running. I've never seen any other OS do that. The WinXP install on my dual-boot needed to be reinstalled. BTW, I never use that other boot anymore.

It's so cool that I've been tweaking my system to the way I want it since 2003 and it's just a long organic process rather than a stop and re-install the entire system every year or two. And even if I want to re-install I now have the knowledge on how to preserve my preferences and tweaks, etc. onto the new machine. Plus I have that stuff all backed up now.

I've always been big on tweaking my system and desktop environment behave just like I wanted it, but now that there is a complete continuing life-cycle of my preferences on Gentoo for me, it's seems like such a waste of time to configure stuff when I use Windows at work and so on that I mostly just keep everything at the default there because I know that in a year or so I'll probably just have to reconfigure it all anyway and possibly with a different set of options and GUI's when it goes to the next version. What a pain. I'll save the tweaking that I love for Gentoo where I know it will honor it and keep it safe.

hoacker · Posted: Fri Nov 02, 2007 4:24 pm Post subject:

I came here from kubuntu because I was sick of release updates screwing my installation. The only thing that seemed to work for me was a clean install of the new release. As well I didn't like that I had to wait for the next distribution release to have major version updates for some applications (e.g. firefox).

Now that I've been running gentoo for 4 months I really love it. I really feel that I have full control over my installation without having an inflexible packaging system constraining me.