"Are we losing users to Gentoo?"

rickinmia · n00b Joined: 20 Mar 2004 Posts: 13 Location: Australia

I too migrated to Gentoo from Debian, but I never found the people on Debian Help to be arrogant or conceted. In fact they always helped me with stupid noob questions. The only reason I came across was knowing that under Debian all my software was compiled for a 386 and the only reason it was running quickly was due to a higher rate of clock cycles rather than processor optimised code. I like knowing that every line of code my cpu fetches-interperates-executes is optimised for it and Gentoo provides just that. I tried installing a base Debian system and compiling downloaded sources but the dependencies were killing me. I must take my hat off to Debian for being there and free but Gentoo is the same as well as being I believe technically superior.

uglyb0b · Apprentice Joined: 07 Sep 2003 Posts: 280

Quite simply: yes. Yes Debian, you are losing people to Gentoo. But... Why is this happening? Because you are old, and your stable tree is older than me. We have Portage, we have a source compilation unstable version. We are the cutting edge, and Debian has to realize this. There is a hierarchery of distributions, and right now Gentoo is at the top. There will always be Slackware, because it's always been there. Debian will remain in second place to the leading distro, and they'll always be wondering: "Why? Why are we losing users to (insert distro name here)?" Because you don't innovate. Sure, you're good. But theres usually something better. Live with it.
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pandaxiongmao · Guru Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 478 Location: USA

I agree.
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d0nju4n · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 8:12 am Post subject:

will3477 · n00b Joined: 27 Jan 2004 Posts: 10

WHhen I first installed gentoo I never planned on staying with it. I actually installed it because I couldn't get debian working and I didn't like red hat or mandrake.

Basically the people at Debian and at a local organization to which several of their contributers belong (think LUG but for open source software) were rude to me when I tried asking questions. With Gentoo it is rare that I actually have to ask, usually I find the answer on the site, which is MUCH quicker. THe few times I have asked questions, people have been very nice. That's why I stuck with gentoo, because I could get answers. AT work I have to deal with red hat (both enterprise and fedora) and I can tell you it has definately convinced me to stay with gentoo. (But at least my job is working with linux)

Gentoo has a nice community, and that's what really brough me to linux in the first place. I miss my old LUG and all the fun we had. Gentoo's the closest thing I've known to a distributed version of that.

robmoss · Posted: Thu May 13, 2004 2:46 am Post subject:

VolcomPimp · Posted: Sat May 15, 2004 10:39 pm Post subject:

not to spam or anything but I was told to take my post here
but I don't wanna double post so I'll just link to what happened to me.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=173238&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

darkmason · Posted: Sun May 16, 2004 12:54 am Post subject: Couldn't decide

After trying Mandrake i wanted something more complex, it was either gonna be Debian or Gentoo. I was a n00b then and I decided on the basis of colour scheme and Larry the Cow. Reading all this makes me so glad i did!

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Hayl · Posted: Tue May 18, 2004 1:11 pm Post subject:

Xayd · n00b Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 10

I still run Debian on a couple servers (stable, without X, just game/web servers). And for that purpose, Debian is still nice. Apt-get is easy (and quick) to maintain the box with and 'stable' is just that. I'm actually a FreeBSD person by preference but game servers/voip servers these days don't usually play nice with emulation, so Linux is a necessary replacement

.

On the other hand, this past week I've been trying to put together a Freevo box and as a desktop/multimedia machine, Debian just doesn't cut it. Stable is using ancient libs and binaries that work with almost nothing semi-recent in hardware terms, and 'testing' still has its share of broken dependencies and bugged packages.

For a server, of course, this doesn't matter, all it has to support is my net card, vga console, and drives, and i'm happy. Where Debian loses people, I think, is situations like mine. People who've got experience running Debian servers at some point get an itch to try out the new toys that have come out for Linux that they haven't used before, and quickly find that Debian is a pain in the ass to do such newer desktop-type things on.

/shrug

Geoff Russell · n00b Joined: 28 Apr 2004 Posts: 16

I use red hat at work and used to use mandrake at home. I have to test
the software our company sells for a living on various Linux distros (we used to
run on Solaris, but all our new customers are linux), so I have a box
with 8 distros on it.

I can install Mandrake/Suse/Red Hat with all the software our customers
need in about 20 minutes. They can install it themselves, but it takes
a little longer and they occasionally stuff something up.

My own machines (1 for me which is up 24x7 for running some mailing
lists, 1 for partner, and 1 for fun/testing) now run Gentoo and Mandrake (Mandrake for the server, but just
because I can't take it down to convert it to gentoo).

For myself, I like setting up a machine with exactly what I want and nothing
else - it is fast and fairly lean. It's also very satisfying to do a gentoo
install (i've now done a grand total of 3). And the more I use
gentoo, the more I like it.

BUT. I can't recommend it for work or our customers because I can't
find a way of installing it in 20-30 mins - and when I'm working, nobody
wants me to enjoy myself, just get the job done, and fast.

I have no idea if gentoo is even after the corporate "market", but if
you are, then a super fast install is required without too many choices - which is probably exactly what most gentoo users don't want!

Cheers,
Geoff Russell,

P.S. I didn't like debian because it just never worked for me. Every
install failed and required hours of mucking around. The stable distribution
is way too far behind the ball and the testing stuff just kept crashing.
I did about 4 installs and spent about 90 hours reading and testing and
while I did get a machine up and running properly it was pain all the
way.

asimon · Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 8:09 am Post subject: Re: gentoo - what's it for

Plain-old-Jeb · n00b Joined: 19 Dec 2003 Posts: 51 Location: My House

Why are these people worried about this in the first place? I use Linux not a Linux Distro. Perhaps debian users view life as to much of a competition or fell the need to have everyone using there distro...... perhaps to justify there distro choice?
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Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

asimon · Posted: Sun May 30, 2004 10:58 am Post subject:

tredman2 · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 6:38 pm Post subject: Distribtution Upgrade Path

I like to think of myself as a fairly seasoned Linux user. I've tried many different distributions since 1994:

In fact, the LFS project is what originally started me looking at Gentoo. I liked the idea of compiling a system from scratch, and actually learning along the way how a Linux system ticked from the bottom up. LFS was ideal for that, and it worked well on my personal machine, but when it came time to install Linux on my wife's and my daughter's computers, it just didn't scale well. I wanted to have the source distro flexibility of LFS with a package management system on par with the larger binary distros.

Gentoo fit that bill perfectly. In fact, it wasn't personal recommendations or published reviews that pointed me towards Gentoo. It was a search on Distro Watch for source-based distributions, and Gentoo was the first one I tried. I must admit, I was hooked. Combine with that, a decent documentation collection and a backing community that spans all levels of users, and I'm pretty much here to stay.

The only thing that Gentoo lacks, and so do most of the other majors, is some kind of enterprise management system, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Tim
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vfxpro · Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2004 6:26 pm Post subject:

LFS is what got me interested in source based distros. Then I discovered Gentoo. Gentoo + portage is a great way to experiment with a source based system without having to worry about all the details.

As a bonus, the Gentoo documentation is great, and the portage repository has a vast, very up to date collection. It's awesome to learn about some new program, and emerge -s $NEWPACKAGE_NAME to find that Gentoo already has it. Plus, you don't have to worry about any of the dependencies the obscure little proggy requires. Binary distros can't come close in that regard.

zayhen · n00b Joined: 26 Nov 2004 Posts: 36

I started off with Slackware and Mandrake.

After the day I began to manage a network with a lot of different machines, I saw I needed some good package system. This brought to gentoo initialy.

Well, the slackware fanatics from the lab became so ofended when I installed gentoo on all the workstations that they began to stop using the lab computers just cause of that.

I think guys that use Slackware or Debian are fanatics. That is the problem.

I like Gentoo, but I really think the Open Source movement is all messed up. If some day I find anything that worls better for me, I will change to it without thinking twice.

Syntaxis · Guru Joined: 28 Apr 2002 Posts: 511 Location: London, UK

Blood Fluke · Apprentice Joined: 15 Sep 2005 Posts: 224

baschni · Apprentice Joined: 08 Sep 2005 Posts: 193

hornett · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Aug 2004 Posts: 84

Blimey baschni, 2 years since the previous post! How did you even find this?! :lol:

aidanjt · Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 5:16 pm Post subject:

Good greif, how many times is this silly thread going to be ressurected?
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baschni · Apprentice Joined: 08 Sep 2005 Posts: 193

I searched for something... concerning harddisk or anything, well you know, the search function of this board is rather bad.
And, well, i just had energy to read the first page

Etal · Veteran Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 1931