it's how linus dreamed it would be

kraylus · l33t Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 648 Location: ft.worth.tx

i've spent almost a month of my life with gentoo exclusively. before gentoo, i was a slack advocate. before slack, i used redhat on and off. before that i had mandrake and before that(!) was SuSE 6.2. the first linux distro i ever attempted (and failed horribly).

this past month with gentoo i have done more with linux than i have the past 4 years with the other guys. with slackware, it was always the hunt for dependencies that i loathed. with redhat it was always the random installs and pain-in-my-ass rpm system that never seemed to want to work. with mandrake it was the incredible bloatyness. we're talkin INCREDIBLE. and unstable on top of that (the last time i installed mandrake, it managed to install EVERYTHING but the kitchen sink... oh, and it somehow forgot to put "make" in there too. suse... well... let's not go there....

i tinkered with freebsd and didn't like it. then again, im not much of a server kinda guy. more of a desktop guy.

gentoo. ooohhhh gentoo. gone are the days of dependency hunting. gone are the days of random installs (it's the same everytime folks - i've done it 5 times so far). and my GOD, it's so bloody fast!! i installed slack on another machine just as something to mess with and chat on while waiting for emerges to complete and it seemed so slow. which is strange, cuz i swore it was the purest and fastest distro out there. but alas, gentoo mops the floor with it! i read how other slackware advocates experience this pang of guilt when finally admitting their convergence with the glory that is gentoo.

but alas, let the guilt shackle you no longer, friends. gentoo is quite admittedly the finest linux distro available today. no other distro in the world can hold a candle to it. slackware never had a chance. the proof is in the pudding. patrick volkerding would want you to be happy, no? if gentoo makes you happy... i think you know what the right choice is

besides... did you really like manually compiling and installing all those dependencies yourselves?

let's not stop at the distro itself though. no sir. the gentoo community is a work of art in and of itself. it personifies the image that i had of linux back in 97' when i first read about it. the free software, and open source, and sharing of the code. it's what linux was meant to be! it's how linus torvalds probably pictured it back in 1991 when he made the monumental post to alt.os.minix.

this is the first time ever that i have seen such a friendly (and giving) linux community. novice and veteran alike can post without fear of derogatory comments or "f*ck you, it worked for me so you must be stupid". you have no idea how often i was told that when asking for help with linux. assholes like that are doing a great disservice to the linux community. but that's another story.

gentoo linux is perfect. i salute the gentoo team for a job well done. you should all be very proud of what you accomplished and know full well that you guys are quite simply the baddest mother f*ckers in the linux world today :mrgreen:

long live linux. long live gentoo.

Ryan Mesler
Gentoo Advocate
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I used gentoo BEFORE it was cool.

Scandium · Posted: Mon Jul 01, 2002 11:13 am Post subject:

It's nice to see people writing really long comments and not only "yeah, it's great !".

I really enjoy reading long comments since I am interested myself what all those people think about Gentoo...

And I really have to admit that it's almost perfect for me too (I am working on cutting out the "almost"

)

kraylus · l33t Joined: 07 Jun 2002 Posts: 648 Location: ft.worth.tx

right on

now if only i werent a gamer, i wouldnt need windows ever again...

tho i hear more and more games are being brought to linux nowadays... one can only hope....
_________________
I used gentoo BEFORE it was cool.

mksoft · l33t Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 844

Scandium · Posted: Mon Jul 01, 2002 12:29 pm Post subject:

I was a gamer a long time, too.

But since about 2 months I am fed up and finally will re-partition soon and delete my hda1 ntfs one

I can live without windows and it was really just the games for me...

Strange...(Most new 'good' games work in Linux as well, so...)

Deech

Scandium

rphillips · Retired Dev Joined: 18 Apr 2002 Posts: 92

A friend of mine tried Return to Castle Wolf in Suse, windows and within Gentoo. RTCW performed faster in Gentoo than in Windows and Suse. So fast, that he was able to up the graphics detail and resolution from his normal playing options.... To say the least for linux gaming; I was impressed.

gsfgf · Veteran Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 1266

Oh yea, OpenGL games are incredible in gentoo. I installed quake 3. it wouldn't streach to fullscreen like windows so icranked up the resolution to 1280. Still higher framerates than windows at 1024.

nbensa · Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 9:12 pm Post subject:

I've noticed this too. Quake3 is smoother in Gentoo Linux than in Windows. I'm glad I've leave Windows behind :-)

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

i have noticed that gentoo is not so much just an OS....

it is linux, it is an Operating system, but these forums seem to be just as much a part of the lives of people that run gentoo as the OS itself, its a community that other OS's just dont compare too, not even MacOS.

Gentoo is the number 4 linux distro..in such a short time..(distrowatch)

with gentoo quickly evoling, it will soon be even bigger. and the beauty of it is that its 100% customizable. sooner or later, someone will build some fancy gentoo configuration wizards, and when they do, they will be optional! unlike mandrake, when a fancy wizard has become the only way to do things.

you will just emerge gentoolkit-gui OR emerge unmerge gentoolkit-gui

the users have the most active participation in improving the OS through these forums. and the developers seem to be the same as the users, real people, they come and chat with us, and then go make the best linux OS even better.

i believe that gentoo is the best linux OS. no exceptions..

i am also on some other forums, such as the OpenBeOS and the BlueEyedOS forums, and i have spoken to guiallame(BlueEyedOS head developer) and suggested using gentoo as the underlying linux to his project and he seemed to think it was a descent idea.

all this from such a young distro..

mksoft · l33t Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 844

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

OR it is number 4 as of july 21 2002

Mandrake Red Hat Debian Gentoo SuSE Slackware Lycoris Beehive

that is a cut and paste, go their and see:

http://www.distrowatch.com/top.php

Scandium · Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 6:37 am Post subject:

all those people saying that Quak3 runs faster:
Do you have low latency patches etc. in your kernel enabled ? And what about preemtpion ?

Some people say those radically cut their performance down and if they disable it it runs at a normal speed

mksoft · l33t Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 844

Bosnian[X] · Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 8:54 am Post subject:

OK, im not blind. Gentoo is number 4 and not 5 on Distrowatch.

mksoft · l33t Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 844

gsfgf · Veteran Joined: 08 May 2002 Posts: 1266

On the front page that's page hits/day. Completely different order all together.

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

front page is just distrowatch's gentoo page hits per day,

while the top is how many users that they count are using gentoo.

mksoft · l33t Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 844

Seems to me that their selection process is quite subjective.
_________________
There's someone in my head but it's not me - Pink Floyd