Did you use Debian before Gentoo?

jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

Just interested to see how many people used Debian before moving to Gentoo as the assumptions seems to be that a lot of people used to.

Jon

solatis · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 12:04 pm Post subject:

I think Debian loses many of their users to Gentoo... I mean, why in the name of the lord would you use a binaries when you can completely optimize your system by compiling from source? Isn't that what linux is all about? Speed, optimizing and stable?

Just my $0.02
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Leon Mergen
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EzInKy · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1742 Location: Kentucky

solatis · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 12:20 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, yeah, you got a point there... speed, optimization and stability is a result for freedom and choice...

I mean, if people have a choice, then developers try harder to make their products BETTER to conquer the market, instead of plainly pre-installing products with your OS to conquer the market

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Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/

psharp · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 12:59 pm Post subject:

In the latest debian weekly news (#46, not on the site yet) they posed the question What can debian learn from gentoo? It seams that they are feeling that people are leaving debian for gentoo so there must be quite a few out there...

Lovechild · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 1:15 pm Post subject:

Used Mandrake, Debian, LFS and then Gentoo..

So yes, I used Debian before Gentoo, and I think I'm a fairly typical Gentoo user in that respect.

solatis · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 1:22 pm Post subject:

A roommate of me (developer of Debian) says the developers are currently considering making arch distributions... so every package is compiled for like 10 differents processors, and then made available.

The problem is that the community that stays with Debian now, doesn't WANT to compile all software on their system, since it plainly takes too much time.
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Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/

sisyphus · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 3:33 pm Post subject:

I've used in order:

RedHat 5.2 - Fun, started learning

SUSE 7 (I think - may have been earlier) - ditto

RedHat 6.something - ditto

Debian Potato - God, what a pig. I don't mind working on an install (I use Gentoo after all) but that's a joke. Not a big fan but then I probably didn't stick with it long enough to learn enough to get excited (two days and three installs before I ran screaming in frustration back into the warm and comforting arms of RedHat).

RedHat 7.2 & 7.3 - Did the job quite nicely (really RedHat was a given since it often ended up on magazine cover disks and I only recently got ADSL).

Then Slackware 8 - loved it. First distro after RH5.2 that I found I could really minimise. I'm sure I could have done it with Deb but I couldn't be bothered fighting it.

Then Gentoo 1.4rc1 - loved it more. I've certainly never felt compelled to contribute in any way to a distro before. Since I started mucking with Gentoo though I have had an overwhelming urge to dispense (often dubious and somtimes downright wrong :oops:

) help to my fellow users.

WindowMaker is the only constant through all this :-)

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jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

bpkri · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 3:40 pm Post subject:

I TRIED to use debian before I found gentoo - and was brave enough to install it. ...but I failed (with debian that is). So much to configure all at once? I don'T really know why I did not succeed with debian. it SEEMS to me more bloated than gentoo, but this might only be my IMPRESSION.

What I like about gentoo is the way to easy update your system (okay - as I'Ve heard that's also not hard with debian), and the etc-update tool! Great idea!

Dies debian have such a thing? How do they handle it? Sometimes it is quite useful to update config files...

jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

EzInKy · Veteran Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 1742 Location: Kentucky

jondkent · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2002 Posts: 289 Location: London

psharp · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 8:55 pm Post subject:

The main thing I didn't like about other distros was the release system. I really like the fact that the portage tree is constantly being updated with new software. I know debian testing is a bit like that but it's not as good as things do break.

I also really like the simplicity of the ebuild system - now I'm learning like linux not debian. Having said that I do have great respect of debian, just it's not what I need now.

eryvile · Apprentice Joined: 14 Aug 2002 Posts: 234 Location: europe

freefall · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 13 Apr 2002 Posts: 89

solatis · Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2002 9:56 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, but not installing gentoo (eg: installing a distribution that uses binaries instead of source) is plainly a waste of hardware in my opinion... I mean, you got your fancy processor, why shouldn't you take all out of it?
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Grtz,

Leon Mergen
http://www.solatis.com/

eryvile · Apprentice Joined: 14 Aug 2002 Posts: 234 Location: europe

zawze · n00b Joined: 24 Oct 2002 Posts: 17 Location: Tau, Norway

I started off with Slackware as my workstation distro. I enjoyed doing everything manual which was a great experience. Though after a while I wanted a package-system and my first thoughts were Debian. I didnt use it for a very long time as some friends recommende Gentoo :) - and since then I've been a Gentoo user.

cram · Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 2:15 am Post subject:

I think most people that switch from Debian to Gentoo do so because they want a desktop system that's up to date. Debian is great for servers that need stability, but it's frustrating being 6 months behind all the other distros on a system that you're actaully sitting in front of and using all day.

oniq · Guru Joined: 02 Sep 2002 Posts: 597 Location: Connecticut

Used Debian before on my iMac, but not on this laptop. Didn't really like it too much, too ancient for my tastes. I may end up trying gentoo PPC at some point and bring some life into the iMac which currently is running Mac OS X--though it just sits there most of the time.
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henke · Posted: Fri Nov 29, 2002 2:52 am Post subject:

I apologize beforehand if I get some Debian users angry. This is not a flame... Well mabey it is.

No I havn't used Debian. It wasn't for lack of trying though. I've tried to install Debian twice. Once BG (Before Gentoo) and once AG (After Gentoo.)

BG) I had only used SuSE. It didn't quite fit. I started looking around for alternatives and found Debian. Loved the philosophy. Freedom/Community/GNU. My problem was that I was a complete newbie. I didn't know what a kernel module was. I didn't do enough research so the install failed. "Debian is not for newbies." Well ok I'll try something else then.

G) After a few months I, the linux newbie, was transformed into someone who isn't totally cluless when it comes to Linux.

AG) Had an old computer (350MHz, 540Mb harddrive, no cd-rom) that I wanted to install Blackbox/X/Linux on. Gentoo was to much of a hassle. I decided to do a Debian floppy/net install. After a while the installer crashed because it ran out of hd space. "Sorry Debian is not perfect..."

The reason I havn't used Debian is because I can't install it. "This guy is totally clueless" you might think. My only response is that I'm writing this on a Gentoo box that I have installed myself.

I don't really care about the speed gain I get from compiling everything myself. I care about:

1) Having reasonably new stuff
2) No dependancy problems
3) Good Documentation
4) A nice friendly community.
4) Free software (free as in freedom)
5) Not ignoring the desktop.

I get all these things with Gentoo. I don't get 1) 2) 3) or 5) with Debian. Debians shift to source solves none of these problems.

Gentoo is newbie friendly while Debian is not. If you look at this poll you'll see that we have lots of people who have migrated from Windows for jebus sake. How many people do you think have gone directly from Windows to Debian?

"Debian is for Developers"
Since I'm not a developer I don't use Debian... :evil:

**Donning asbestos suit**

S_aIN_t · Guru Joined: 11 May 2002 Posts: 488 Location: Ottawa

i used RH for a couple of weeks in 1999.. after that i kind of game up on the whole open source idea. then in 2001 i started using FreeBSD. and after more or less being happy with BSD, i found Gentoo.

I like Gentoo because it has the ports system like bsd.. and i can manage Gentoo. with the other distros i get frustrated too quickly.

chrb · n00b Joined: 23 Jun 2002 Posts: 19

Debian had a few annoying problems -

The packages are ancient, even in unstable. They took far too long with gcc 3.2, kde 3 and Mozilla 1.0. Gentoo usually has ebuilds of important packages the day they're released. I know the Debian excuse is that stuff has to be incredibly stable, but really they miss a lot of bug fixes by running such old versions.

Dependency hell - mixing packages between stable, testing, and unstable is impossible. With gentoo I can still use brand new packages like Mozilla 1.2 from unstable with accept_keywords, and since its built from source it will link to my existing libraries.

The distribution itself - debian packages tend to be maintained by one person. If this person gets bored/has no time then the package grows old and stale. Also a lot of packages are just "scratch an itch" things - I make ebuilds if I want to try something out but I don't want to commit to maintaining them. Gentoo is great for this, you can just submit an ebuild that you've made, submit patches and updates for other peoples ebuilds etc. Having such easy access to the latest packages and source code encourages rapid evolution of the distribution. Look at how quickly gcc3 problems in packages got ironed out when LFS and Gentoo started using them.

Presentation - the Gentoo documentation is better, the forums are more enjoyable than the debian lists (I don't know why.. Debian seems to attract too many elitists), the web site is quicker to search and more informative. Less focus on politics and more on tech.

The only good things I still see in Debian are the commitment to free licensing, the binaries (though Gentoo will have this with the reference platform), and the multiarchitecture builds. And to be fair, Gentoo does have its problems as well. There are new package ebuilds in bugzilla that have been languishing for months. The portage mirrors are wide open for cracking.. heck, I could set up one officially and be serving trojaned ebuilds tomorrow.

At the end of the day its about freedom - binary distros tell you what software you can run, but with source distros you choose.

mmealman · Guru Joined: 02 Nov 2002 Posts: 348 Location: Florida

I used Slackware back in the early 90's, mostly because it was the only distribution I knew about.

Then around the mid 90's I gave Red Hat a try. I really liked the RPMs, but I didn't like how so many features were turned on by default(stock RH in those days would turn on things like fingerd) and the config files were a pain to edit by hand. They had TCL-TK apps you'd use to edit your config files, but they were real limited in what you could do and it made it a pain to hand edit the files.

Then maybe in 98 I stumbled onto Debian and really thought it was a distribution done right. The base install didn't turn too many utils on, the system was well setup to maintain itself(logs auto-rotated, etc) and updating the system was such a breeze using apt.

What I like about Gentoo is that it's very much like Debian, installs only what you say to install, easy to update and get new packages, but it doesn't come with Debian's "overhead". For example, right now they're working on getting KDE3 into the Debian main, but they want to do GCC 3.2 first, which will take practically forever.

I like how Gentoo cuts through the BS and just puts ebuilds out. Yeah, that sometimes creates problems. Like the "mozilla is compiled under gcc 3.2 while java isn't, so the java plug-in doesn't work". But that stuff usually gets resolved fairly quickly and is worth putting up with when you're getting the latest versions of apps.