Lets start with why I decided to post...

[MilkyMilky]

In one sentence - I got my baby going with the 1.3b build, got X up and running and then wanted to cvs co my source code - CVS was not installed.

This for me was the turning point in finding my expressionist environment. I, me Daniel Hams get to choose exactly how much 'cruft' sits on my desktop, piece by piece, as I need it. Lets have a bit of background: (I do go on a bit, sorry about that)

I've been a coder for many a year now since university (Bath Uni, England) - mostly fun stuff for personal enlightenment - you know, some interesting Java/Apache web plugins for showing user chats, the odd bit of 3d graphics. At Uni, I had the opportunity to do my final year project on the SGI workstations in the lab - man, those babies rocked - this was at the time that the Amiga was bleading edge with their seperate GPU ( I don't care what NVidia says, Amiga was there a long time ago, they just screwed up big time on their marketing...).

The SGI's had this 'solid stable and fast' feeling that I missed when trying to compile my insertion sort on my SAS compiler on my A500. ( I won't mention I got banned from using the university computers for attempting to spoof mail through the university maths-campus gateway, which took down the campus network for a day. That was a fun meeting with the head of studies and the university chancellor.)

After Uni, I sadly threw myself at the Wintel platform (lets face it, not too many options, just out of Uni, need to find work). I was always looking for that same feel of solidity and pure sheen that I felt working at that £10,000 workstation.

My jobs fortunately took me heavily into the UNIX fold, where I met, and played with IRIX, AIX, Solaris and HPUX, and all the people I met were talking about a free version of all that goodness I could run at home. Wow momma. My introduction was to Redhat 5.1 (and to be fair to redhat, I think they have done more for the free software community than they are given credit for.) It was a blast, finally a real operating system on my P2-233.

Time passes, Dan upgrades through the Redhat cycle. For me, it was about Redhat 7.1 where they lost me with their umpteen packages and dependencies. RPM goes all to hell if you want to install Lesstif and OpenInventor with GCC3.

I guess you see where this is going. I took the plunge last week, after having my Win2000 partition finally point its nipples in the air on my platinum home machine. Time for a change I thought. That gentoo wotsit, that looks like the girlfriend might divorce me. What really turned me on, (and her off, appropriately), was being able to do the build from scratch using a GCC3 compiler. I've been compiling my graphics crap in a bastardised Redhat/GCC3/XercesC environment for about 6 months because the C++ support in GCC2.X is pants. Enter Gentoo.

I got the 1.3b, set that baby going. Had the other machine pointing at the gentoo website just in case anything really went nasty - and not a hitch - guys, I gotta hand it to you, I'm no einstein, but for a 'linux from scratch' install, thats stealing the walking frame from grandma.

So I'm up and running with _purely_ the stuff I want - SSHD, NTPD, CVS, GNOME2 (thankyou guys, thank you), kernel latency patch, and with real, accelerated X. Yoda suprised with that, he is.

But the best of all, and pay attention for the science bit, is that I have learned a great deal indeedy about my system, its makeup, and its warts too. (Adding in the low-latency patch, pre-emptible kernel and 100 Jiffies on my athlon gets me kernel panics - reseting the jiffies to 1000 solves that tho.)

So thankyou Gentoo developers, maintainers, and envangelists for providing me with that SGI workstation-ness feeling on a commodity PC with a commodity graphics card, for free.

Any of you Gentoo'ers in Belgium (I believe Bart the release maintainer might be from Ghent...) are more than welcome to claim their pint of Irish beer in any of the umpteen Irish boozers in Brussels (sorry, where I live, don't have transport at the moment).

Nice one. Really.

[mksoft]

Too bad you can't choose two options. I voted for choosing my config as it is really important to me , but wanted to vote for "wanted cutting edge software" as well.

One more thing is the simplicity of ebuilds, and the abillity to change them easily to suit one's needs.
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There's someone in my head but it's not me - Pink Floyd

[abhishek]

[pjp]

Before knowing anything else about Gentoo, I wanted it optimized for speed. I also like being able to choose stuff, but that came more after I switched. Also, I liked what I'd heard about emerge, but I really didn't have enough knowledge about the subject to use that as a reason to switch.

Definately speed optimizations. After installing/using, ease of installation should be up there too (which doesn't include broad hardware support). Other than Windows, I had no issues with the install.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

[phong]

But there are so many reasons (some not listed)! After dealing with so many RH distributions, it's so nice to finally "emerge" from .rpm hell. Also, the rc-scripts are pretty slick and great to work with. The hard-core customization, system optimizations, etc. rule. And the fact that I'm actually learning more about how the OS works, and the non-bloatness of it (only installing exactly what I want and no cruft). I guess all of that makes me feel pretty 31337. All of the above. (-:

[slais-sysweb]

But mostly being in control. I have two machine running Getoo at the moment, both dual booting with SuSE and already I find I need SuSE less and less. With Gentoo I know what I've got and where it is because I installed it: deliberatly and conciously.
Portage is a really elegant packaging system, the documentation is both excellent and concise (maybe because with so little cruft being installed there is no need for cruft in the documentation)
I am really enjoying building up a Gentoo system and learning something with every new package.
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djc
sysweb SLAIS UCL