Sick of Gentoo

Omega21 · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 1:19 am Post subject:

I hate these threads.
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yabbadabbadont · Posted: Tue Sep 19, 2006 7:23 am Post subject:

pjo123 · Posted: Sun Oct 01, 2006 7:55 pm Post subject:

Have read most of this thread and up till now have resisted the need for comment, but hey what the heck, why not

Personally I love Gentoo, but if I'm 100% honest I love it because I like playing around with computers and I personally (probably a lot by choice) spend far far more time actiually playing around and tweaking/updating Gentoo than I do actually using it for anything that constructive.

On my sons PC I installed Mandriva. It's a much lower spec PC, has loads of crap he'll never use installed, might take a few more seconds to boot, but if I run the average program on his PC, then on mine, I can notice hardly any (if any at all) difference whatsoever.

I also do not hate Microsoft. I read comments aboout windoz etc and how unstable it is etc, but to a point I disagree. I had XP installed on my PC for a year, a decent firewall spy checker etc, didn't visit dodgy sites, and everything ran smoothly. Never crashed, all hardware worked etc. My sons PC is a different matter, slows down after about 3 months with all the junk sites etc he visits. Still no real problem, takes 10 mins to back up his game save files and documents, one quick reformat later and within 60 mins, his entire system is working at full speed again. In fact it's quicker to do this than it is to install Mandriva on his PC and get all his things working properly.

Then I come back to my gentoo system. I want to use my sound card, how long does it take me to work out what slider on Alsamixer does what? Far longer than it takes to install XP from scratch.

I'm not knocking Gentoo when I say things like this, I just get sick of people getting offended when anyone says a thing against it or how people are thought of as the devil if they say anything good about MS.

Linux has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years and I for one doubt I'll ever stop dual booting. But it still has a long way to go before I would consider getting rid of XP. This of course isn't the fault of Linux but the fault of hardware vendors and software companies. I've just put up for sale my Soundblaster X-FI card and brought an Audigy4 because of the lack of support for Linux drivers from Creative. There's games that I just want to turn on my PC and play in surround sound, with few exceptions I need XP to do this properly.

Personally I find Gentoo my favourite system for adding software to and have no intention of going away from it anytime in the forseeable future, that said, I read threads aboout people leaving gentoo and why they think it's dying etc and these people often have really valid points but are just slated by people saying "My systems been running 3 years and I have no problems" implying that just because they've had no problems, no one else should, or others don't have the right to voice their concerns. Ignoring such concerns and slating people for voicing their concerns is the one thing most likely to lead to any products ultimate downfall (I'm not saying all concerns are valid, just that we should discuss them civily)

steveL · Posted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 12:10 am Post subject:

ChoppedInHalf · n00b Joined: 25 Oct 2004 Posts: 32 Location: Leander, TX

Sorry, just discovered this thread. Is the keep-threads-short etiquette still in effect? If so, then sorry.

Been using Gentoo at home for maybe 2 years?

Been using Gentoo at work (authorized platform at work, too!) for, I dunno, 18 months? Hell, I'm not even sure how to find out! In AIX the command would be:

Fruitwoot · Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 12:27 am Post subject:

You can be "sick" of gentoo cuz Gentoo is all about choices :lol:

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mr.isomer · n00b Joined: 16 Feb 2004 Posts: 47

i am sick of this thread.... every time i search for something i get this. god

Corona688 · Veteran Joined: 10 Jan 2004 Posts: 1204

bluedevils · Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 1:36 pm Post subject:

For those who know how to drive. He wants the convenience of automatic with the control of a manual shift.

manual (stick shift) - gentoo
dsg, smg (sequential shifting, manual shift with psuedo automatic) - kubuntu,ubuntu
manumatic (automatic with psuedo manual shifts) - osx
automatic - windows

smoooth · n00b Joined: 30 Oct 2006 Posts: 3

I switched to gentoo about four years ago and everything was great. I'm not feeling that way anymore.

Seems like years ago things worked. Maybe it was because there was no AMD64 and there were more people concentrating on making x86 work. Who knows. In the past year and a half I've gotten more scared everytime I tried to
update world or any package. Things would break... but I would search through the forums and fix them. Now
things break and the everything seems VERY unstable. So unstable I had to quit using it. I tried to nail the problem
down but just too much time and effort for what it's worth.

I decided to try slackware. I was amazed at how quick I could get a full operational system that was very quick
and stable. I notice no speed difference between the two. I am not here proclaming the greatness of any one distro
because I already seem shortcomings in slack...but one thing that needs to addressed in Gentoo is quality and stability.

I think it is great there are people working on the cutting edge providing the features up to the day before. I think
there should be a stable set of releases that are tested and are in solid working order. That is my ONLY complaint.

I wish I could use gentoo because I really like the concept. The concept is genius but it isn't at practical usable level anymore.

I will try gentoo again in a year or so and see where it is... one thing I can say is that gentoo has helped me learn
linux. I can fly through other distros with the "troubleshooting" experience I got from gentoo and the forums.

Just a thought.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:01 am Post subject: Re: After four years...

meranto · Posted: Mon Oct 30, 2006 2:09 am Post subject:

smoooth · n00b Joined: 30 Oct 2006 Posts: 3

Actually I forgot my username and password so I just created a new account. Actually I never posed anything
anyway. I always read other posts and sometimes posted to other linux forums.

No I just felt it was necessary to express my thoughts because when I read others views about it I found
that I felt the same way.. and it was somewhat of a relief.

smoooth · n00b Joined: 30 Oct 2006 Posts: 3

Simius · Posted: Mon Dec 04, 2006 8:28 pm Post subject:

MM23 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 10 Nov 2006 Posts: 83

All Windows has ever had going for it is luck. Back in the day, Windows was lucky enough to get it's spot in the limelight -- and has retained it. All the bigwig software and hardware companies support Windows -- not Linux. Why develop drivers for a free operating system when you can develop for one that people are paying for? That seems to be the logic behind it.

If you could somehow give the Linux community support from the huge plethora of software companies that develop for Windows there wouldn't be any more annoying hardware workarounds or missed software.

That's seriously the biggest thing holding Linux back, and it kind of sucks, because I don't see it ever changing. Most software developers are too incompetent to develop for Unix anyway.

"OMG, it uses forward slashes instead of back slashes??!??!"

I think more companies should do what Nvidia does. Seriously, Nvidia's Linux driver team is fucking great.

Genjix · Apprentice Joined: 23 Jun 2005 Posts: 163

W3BMAST3R101 · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jun 2004 Posts: 197

Azaroth · n00b Joined: 18 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

V-Man · n00b Joined: 19 Jun 2003 Posts: 38 Location: A chair

# beat -target dead_horse

After reading most of this thread, there were a few points that stood out:

1. A lot of people are waiting for that point where OSS applications, whether they're full-blown DE's or just some MP3 player, will just "work". I, personally, don't think this will ever happen. And it's not because the people doing the development are incompetent (I've written my share of OSS), it's that the manpower isn't there to meet the technological rush. Let's take X for instance. It's tried and true, even if it has it's share of quirks. The reason it's never been able to reach that zenith where it has zarro bugs is the need for more bells and whistles. Just when they've got it to the point where it always "just works", the community at large needs composite support. Now, this limited set of developers, who don't have quite the backing of Microsoft or Apple, have to shift gears and add LOTS of new functionality to a product, which always introduces new bugs. Now there are 2 groups that are unhappy: the everyday user is upset because his once stable desktop now has all these weird quirks, and the bleeding edge user is angry because the composite support in X is really buggy. Insert a different application and a different technology shift, and you've explained the quirks in just about every application known to Linux. It's not the dev's fault, or the community's fault. It's the constant need by BOTH to improve. The 2 main reasons you don't see this with other OS's is because:

In the years between "stability", the OS never changes. They release the "stable" version, then 4-5 years later, they release the next "stable" version, with all the new bells and whistles already working (mostly).
They have fleets of developers, all working within basically the same environment and the same set of rules, all well supported (financially and otherwise). Linux will never have either of these, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

2. If you were to take an OS such as linux, make everyone play within the same ruleset and jump through hoops to allow for some unified management system (ala an MMC type configuration dialog), guess what? You'd get Windows. Most of the Linux apps I've ever used are so awesome because they weren't saddled with some sort of pre-determined set of boundaries. The developer was free to think on his own, with only the rules of the kernel and standard library to hold him back. While I'm not saying some standard interfaces wouldn't be a good thing (see freedesktop), making everything look and act the same for the sake of ease of configuration is EXACTLY what most people who move away from M$ and OSX are trying to break out of...uniformity. To use someone else's analogy, saying linux should move away from CLI based configuration/operation and implement an MMC strategy similar to Windows is like driving a manual transmission and saying "We should put an automatic in here." We already have an automatic. It's called WindowsXP/OSX. If that's what you want, you're in luck. But I for one, and I think a lot of long-time linux users would agree with me, don't want an automatic. Making it "just work" comes at a price. To argue this shows a lack of understanding. TANSTAAFL. Everything comes at a price. The ease of mainstream OS's comes at the cost of power. I for one am not willing to pay that price.

For whatever it's worth, I started using Linux with RedHat 5.2. I've migrated up (or down, however you want to look at it) the food chain looking for "My Anti-Windows"©. Not that Windows is bad, per sey. In fact I just finished building myself a new Windows box for gaming. As a developer/power user, though, I always found myself needing something more than Windows could provide. I continue to need more, and the OSS developers of the world are constantly struggling to keep up with our collective needs.

Threads like this say something about the Linux OS as a whole, and Gentoo in particular. Linux is awesome. So awesome that people feel passionately about it. I've found that people who are indifferent on a subject rarely make a peep. I think most of the time when you hear "I'm sick of (x)", what people are really trying to say is "I REALLY, REALLY, REALLY love (x). So much I'm frustrated it's not just a little better."
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Kai Hvatum · Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 4:35 am Post subject:

Using Gentoo to reach a conclusion about bugs in OSS is unfair. Gentoo is great, but it is not designed to be a static rock solid distribution.

On the other hand, having used Suse and others for awhile I must say there has been consistent improvement. Every time I install Suse or something of the like for a friend I notice significant improvement in the latest permutation. The change is not drastic or overnight, but the Linux desktop (KDE, X etc.) without doubt now has a solid underpinning that you can depend on 24/7. The bleeding edge features of your hardware might not work clean install of Suse, but you'll have a solid computer and that's enough for a lot of people.
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Still using Gentoo, just too busy for forums these days.

Headrush · Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 6:58 am Post subject:

Kai Hvatum · Posted: Sat Feb 03, 2007 8:50 am Post subject: