What makes Gentoo better than Redhat?

carlos123

I am still trying to decide whether to go through the hassle of downloading and trying a second Gentoo version now that my first one was full of quirks and problematic.

Can someone briefly go over the reasons why Gentoo is better than Redhat? If it is? From the standpoint of a robust, stable, flexible distribution?

I am looking for reassurance lest I waver in my committment to work through the problems I am encountering installing Gentoo.

I just want to know if Gentoo is truly better than Redhat and why. Not because one is easier to install or not. That's too simplistic. Take it from after the installation. Why is Gentoo better?

I mean in my understanding the Linux kernel is the Linux kernel right? One version of the kernel is just as good as any other version (aside from one having more built in support for various hardware than another one of course). Is that right? And if that isn't right what makes the Linux kernel used by Gentoo better than that used by Redhat for example.

Redhat does have RPM's which are a pain to deal with but at the same time I am wondering if the Gentoo Portage collection of bash scripts can just be ported for use under Redhat?

I mean if the ebuild scripts are in bash script why can't they run under Redhat? With a little tweaking of the bash source to point to where Redhat expects software to be installed?

Is that possible? Is that within the acceptable uses of the Gentoo ebuild scripts?

Any insight on this would be appreciated.

Carlos

BonezTheGoon

carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 1:46 am Post subject:

Thanks very much for your input!

Even though you didn't go into a great deal of detail as to why you favor Gentoo, what you did say, the thread you mentioned, and other things I have read on the Internet are enough to tell me that for the average user coming from Windows, Gentoo is really not that much better than any other distro. In fact it may be worse.

When I say average user, I mean a user who has a very good machine with lots of RAM, lots of disk space, and whose main use of Linux is to productively get something done apart from tinkering with the Linux kernel. Or spending a lot of time tweaking their system configuration to get that extra 5% of speed.

I do see an advantage to Gentoo similar to that of LFS. Namely that one can build one's system from scratch and install only that which one wants. Without a lot of excess files laying around from unused programs. Yet some extra files laying around don't seem to hurt too much and any disadvantage to having such files around seems to be more than offset by the increased productivity of installing a distribution which is easier to use. Right out of the box so to speak.

I think I will still give it another try or two at installing Gentoo just for the learning experience and to more easily use the Portage installs. But at least now I have a much clearer picture as to what the issues are between it and other distributions.

Thanks again.

Carlos

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

The best reason to use Gentoo (IMHO) is to get away from the Redhat 6month dev cycle, and to have a system which can be managed over a long period of time before anything drastic needs to be done and without it falling behind. Basically the move from Windows to Redhat was for me a transition from reinstalling every 2 months to reinstalling every 6 months. I have used this particular gentoo install (my first) for almost one year now and see no reason it couldn't outlast the hardware.

EvilTwinSkippy · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 5:10 am Post subject: Long Term Viability

Gentoo for me is the ideal data center distro.

I run a large computer network. We have 9 mission critical servers that have to be operating at all times. The provide email, domain name service, file sharing, some databases, real bread and butter stuff. They are bolted in the rack, and I don't get a budget to replace them until 2004.

No back in 2001 when I installed them all I used a cutting edge version of Redhat: 7.0. Since then I have had to periodically take the whole network down, and upgrade these boxes, AND all of their software, AND hope that it works when it was all said and done.

Theoretically I could still be running with 7.0, and just keep them alive with patches. Except of course, the only patches that are available are for old versions of the software. In the case of the Kernel, MySQL and Samba I keep them up to date with the latest bleeding edge version, which often meant installing either from the source or from someone other than RedHat's RPM. The locations of files can be quite different between the two.

I also run into bit rot. With all the bugs in Linux, you end up installing A LOT of patches. Each of those patches has some little bug that corrupts the RPM database just a little bit, until the RPM system becomes completely unusable.

Event the RedHat sanctioned packages leave little presents. I can't tell you how many different copies of the Kernel I have on those servers. Plus I followed their standard partion recommendations, that told me to create a 50 meg boot partition. Piling kernels + not much space = no room for upgrades. We had a spate of glibc updates last year that played havoc with all of my software. And man alive, RedHat is notorious for putting out a patch that relies on another patch that relies on another patch, the inexplicable requires you to install a new program...

Some folks tell me I should wipe the boxes and do a clean reinstall. That would be great if I had something to run the network on in the meantime. Plus, these are server with very specialized settings and tweaks that take months to perfect.

As long as you have the option of wiping the box for every upgrade, Gentoo will not be that useful. If you have a machine that needs to stay running, and be connected to the internet, Gentoo is the only way to keep your sanity. I'm actually putting it through its paces NOW so that come next year I know all the right tricks to put it on the new horses.
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carlos123 · Posted: Fri Feb 21, 2003 11:49 am Post subject:

Good stuff EvilTwinSkippy. You definitely bring up some of the best Gentoo pros verses Redhat I have heard yet!

Although I have not had Redhat for long I can see the types of problems you mention on the horizon and it's not pretty.

Now that I have more or less installed Gentoo (still got a few more final steps to go) perhaps I will come to see it as the quality distribution that so many say it is.

Thanks again (you too David).

Carlos

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Some other threads that might be of interest:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo.
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perry · Posted: Sat Feb 22, 2003 1:47 am Post subject:

I prefer Gentoo over RedHat for one reason -- portage. I got so that I couldn't stand using rpm any more. It was just frustrating me too much. The straw that broke the camel's back was trying to upgrade KDE and messing up something pretty good. I really don't care about installing from source and all that, I just like the ease of upgrading packages when a new version comes out.

I had narrowed my choices down to Debian or Gentoo. I already had a copy of the LiveCD w/ Unreal on it, and I found the install instructions for Gentoo before Debian... so off I went!

Koon · Retired Dev Joined: 10 Dec 2002 Posts: 518

In my opinion :

- for workstations :
Gentoo is better than RedHat because it allows to test (and use) cutting-edge versions of the desktop software (XFree, Xft, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, OpenOffice...). Big improvements are made in this area every day and yes, I don't think I can wait for RedHat to ship new versions before using them.
But if I want a standard and proven desktop, maybe I would use RedHat 8.

- for servers :
I admin several RedHat server boxen. One of them is running our mail server. I use apt-rpm for upgrades and dependancy-hell-handling. I know that RPM can corrupt but for the moment I have no problems.
My problem is that I have software installed through RPM on one side, and software installed through compilation/manual install on the other side. For several reasons I use a custom exim/courier-imap setup : I had to compile exim and courier-imap with several specific options, so it is an exception to my all-RPM setup. Now I use the Mail:SpamAssassin perl package, and this one is upgraded through perl -MCPAN, so it is also an exception to the all-RPM setup. Now take pure-ftpd. I use the RPM install, but now the newest RPM are not compatible with RedHat 7.3. So I am left with the choice of upgrading the server to RedHat 8, or compiling from source... etc etc
If I used Gentoo I would have had everything handled by portage, even the custom packages, and upgrade would have been conveniently done using a single system. The Gentoo software library is big, bigger than RedHat official repositories, so you have more choices. For that matter, I could also use Debian with the same good results. But I am not sure I will make that mistake of choosing RedHat again.
On the drawbacks of using Gentoo for servers : you have to compile on the server itself (so you have to have a compiler in and waste CPU) and there is no support you can rely on.

-K

noff · Posted: Mon Feb 24, 2003 7:05 pm Post subject:

I switched from Redhat to Gentoo mainly to get software quicker. I was on osnews and they were talking about kde beta and there was a gentoo user who said it was easy to install just "emerge kde" So I tried it. The main benefit was I was already compiling kernels on Redhat and I was already partitioned so the rest was easy. I didn't want to have to wait for 8.1 in order to get kde 3.1.

I stuck with Gentoo because it is faster, but also because it is more fun, yet easier. That's right faster, funner, easier.

And actually the speed increase becomes more dramatic the faster your computer, as there are architectural changes to that can be taken advantage of by a compiler. It is much better to compile specifically for a pentium4 than a pentium.

So there are a number of reasons why gentoo is better than redhat. However if you just want a computer that works, run redhat.
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chadders · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 21 Jan 2003 Posts: 113

I tried out redhat, mandrake, debian and linux from scratch (and freebsd and openbsd) and got them all to work.

I'm not a admin of a bunch of servers or anything i just use it for myself and my little brother. I like gentoo because its faster and way cool and the peeps on here are LOTS nicer, and I REALLY REALLY like portage and emerge. Plus if you want to do weird stuff and try out things you can.

RedHat and Mandrake are cool to but their stuff is older than gentoo and you cant have just want you want without a bunch of other stuff installed very easy and sometimes figuring out RPM dependencies is a big pain in the butt. They try to make stuff work for EVERYONE and dont worry so much about way cool stuff. RedHat and Mandrake peeps are nice. Alan Cox even helped me fix stuff couple of times

When I had troubles with Debian the peeps on IRC i ask to help me were MEAN so I gave up. They are meaner than FreeBSD and OpenBSD peeps and made me feel like a stupid idiot anytime i went on there and most of them know less stuff than me! I try real hard to figure out stuff by myself and even made a linux from scratch and got it to work but it was too hard to keep everything updated so i dont use it anymore.

Gentoo linux is my fav linux and Gentoo friends are my fav friends!!!!!!!

Chad

corrs_fan · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2003 8:55 pm Post subject:

I used redhat for a short while, as my desktop OS. I really thought it was great. All my hardware was correctly detected, no glitches etc, and to top it all off it was actually very well integrated unlike some of the other distros, and much more so than my latest attempts of tweaking gnome, on gentoo.

All was well till i tried to upgrade to the latest version of something, which of course needed many other newer dependancies, and left me to trawl the net for them, then figure out how to install these too. Comapare this with portage that basically does it all for you.

The support is a NON issue for most IMHO as there isnt a problem (of the many i hit) that i havent been able to resolve using these forums, though if its a server, that RH support can be attractive.

Also because the end system has been compilied on your system, it should be faster, than a stock RH rpm binary.
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Keyed · Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2003 4:47 am Post subject:

I have bounced from Redhat, Mandrake, LFS and Gentoo. After losing the drive that Gentoo was on it was a while before I installed it again, but the whole time it seemed like something was missing. After getting a new 80G drive, I have Mandrake and Gentoo on it but I only use Gentoo. It just seems like Redhat and Mandrake required to much tweaking to get everything to operate correctly and I prefer KDE which Redhat doesn't really even support, I think they just kind of throw the RPMs on there with no real concern if they are correct or not.

I am far happier with Gentoo. It just works for me, and if I have a technical question a quick search of the forums generally provides an answer if it is not covered in the man pages or docs.
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