Just another thanks to the team behind gentoo.

[jba]

Just a little about me:

mid-late 1990's: managed a bunch of solaris / irix boxes (hundreds)
early 2000's: managed tons of freebsd / redhat boxes (hundreds of thousands)
recently: managed a bunch of gentoo boxes. (hundreds)
today: asked to help out on some redhat EL boxes.


I love gentoo. I have since i first used it (probably around 2004). It's so easy to use. So flexible. So .... NICE...

But i forgot just how nice it is. An old friend of mine whose struggling through some systems issues asked me to come in and help him with a bunch of RHEL boxes recently. HOLY @#&*@ have i been taking for granted how nice gentoo is to use and admin.

Using RHEL now is like going back to the stone ages. It's really that drastic.

I just want to thank all of you who work on gentoo. You've helped to create something truly special. Despite all the moaning on this board about gentoo, it remains the best distro out there for power users. (and yes, i've tried most of them recently).

Cheers to the whole team!

[alex.blackbit]

i agree.
some things work like they should in gentoo, and for some reason it's the only unix-like environment where that's the case.
examples:

• rc-update is a nice tool to maintain the services of certain runlevels. i am not aware of something like that in other distros or proprietary unices.
• the init scripts have a common output, that makes clear what is happening. the best solution in my opinion.
• the portage tree can be searched as one is expecting!
  e.g. on a debian/ubuntu system you enter "apt-cache search mono" and get all kinds of weird output.
  to my knowledge it is not possible to search either in the package name or the description. on gentoo, "emerge -s" does what it should. my beloved "eix" is even greater.
• the upcoming portage-2.2 will be a stunning thing. the "preserved-rebuild" set is a mighty, mighty tool. "module-rebuild" makes it easy to switch to a new kernel.
• the location of binaries (/usr/bin), libraries(/usr/lib), headers(/usr/include), binary packages(/opt) in predictable. on other systems i always go searching.
• something as simple as qlist makes life easy. i need it quite often.

all these features make gentoo _VERY_ flexible and easy to work with.
this list can be extented as needed.
gentoo is not perfect, but it is getting better every day. i use nothing else.

just my .5$