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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2012 2:56 am    Post subject: I <3 Gentoo Reply with quote

Just wanted to say thanks to all the Gentoo developers, never really got a chance to before. I nearly gave up on Linux when I started using RedHat in my feeble attempts to learn Linux. RPM hell made me love my Windows 2003 setup (back in the day). Then little by little I forced myself to learn Gentoo and honestly after all these years I have to say it really has spoiled me. I've recently tried Back Track, Ubuntu, Mint, and Arch. All of them were mostly from trying to get friends into Linux and not wanting to wait for compile times or teaching them everything about Gentoo and trying to get their systems set up nicely.

But in the end I always go back to Gentoo even happier than before. Back Track just plain sucked end of story. Ubuntu is too bloated. Mint had lots of messed up behavior with ATI drivers and kind of a wacky interface so my friend gave up on trying it out, Arch installer sucked more than anything I've ever tried. And even though Gentoo takes more time to set up, it runs so nice and smoothly in the end. The occasional errors here and there are quickly fixed with the help of forums and gentoo utilities, end up being little bumps in the road.

I run a minimalistic Openbox environment with almost nothing else, and I love it. Every system I've ever set up this way, felt like it was at least twice as fast as the bloated one-size-fits-all installations of kde/gnome setups in other distros.

I also love how over the years the ricing has died down, configurations have become much simpler and easier with march=native and xorg getting pretty good at running how it should without all the configuration work, among tons of other things. Not to mention with this i7 netbook, the compile times for most packages almost feel like emerging binary versions.

One effect I've noticed is I kind of feel stupid in most primarily gui based distributions, and everything takes longer to fix and figure out. I feel right at home in my console on a Gentoo setup. Everything just makes sense, and there's rarely ever guess work when it comes to figuring out why something isn't working.

Also can't forget to mention that I love the work Gentoo users have done on documentation. There are so many times that I'll search for something Linux related on the net and something from the gentoo wiki, or gentoo forums comes up.

I hope this isn't the wrong part of the forum to put this, but I felt like sharing my overall experience :).
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Hypnos
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2012 2:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm sure the developers will appreciate it.

I've been using Gentoo exclusively on my own machines since 2002. Every other Linux distro I've had to use through school/work feels "wrong."
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 21, 2012 5:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I also love Gentoo. I don't like compiling, but other distributions just don't please me as much as Gentoo does, so I have to stick with Gentoo.

Hypnos wrote:
Every other Linux distro I've had to use through school/work feels "wrong."

Same here. I wanted to switch to another distro countless times, but I just can't do it. They all really feel kind of "wrong."
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Hypnos
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 2:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

The "feel" in my case I think arises from two things:

1) Even if another distro does the job in the end, it's full of design decisions I wouldn't have made. In Gentoo you have a lot more control over what tools you have installed and how they operate. Virtuals and USE flags are two major aspects of this control.

2) Breakage is much easier to fix in Gentoo. In case of a broken link just revdep-rebuild, or in other cases just copy the ebuild to your personal overlay and add a patch.

In short, control and fixability, which both come from the source-based nature of Gentoo. Of course we could be running Linux-from-scratch, but Gentoo makes being source-based far less onerous.
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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 22, 2012 4:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's exactly how I feel. I also like it for the learning experience though. I've learned so much just from using Gentoo than I wouldn't have known otherwise had I used some primarily gui based binary distro.
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Catanduva
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 1:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Feel the same here. I tried everything i can, but when i need to install some software like mplayer and it comes with that huge amount of dependencies that i won't use i feel like i'm wasting time and space in my hardware.
I go back to Gentoo everytime.
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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 1:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

That's a good example, another one is how some distributions make it a pita to configure anything with the kernel and when you do lsmod it seems like every module ever written is loaded.
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PostPosted: Wed Apr 25, 2012 4:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

portage is a godsend, really, I remember back in the 90s how awesome it was to scour the internet for rpm dependencies, from gentoo not only have I gained control in how my systems are configured but also efficiency in the time it takes to not only compile custom software but to easilly update the same software.
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 3:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This is sometime after the OP, but it seemed like the place to post the way I feel about Gentoo. I think it's great and I can't say enough good things about the support I've received in getting my system up and running. I only wish I had the courage to ask my questions much earlier. In just 3 days, I went from not knowing my way around the command line to a fully functoning KDE desktop with my favorite software, printing, hardware support, browser plugins and what all. And the system is much faster than it ever was under openSUSE (don't get me wrong, that's not a bad place to start but I stayed in it longer than I should have). I have tried Kubuntu, Mint on other machines, but Gentoo is definitely the best and cleanest.

I have never had to wait for a reply to a post; I only had to ask the right question in the right place. And I am overcoming the feeling of asking dumb questions. Everybody's got to start somewhere and all you need is determination. So my hat's off to everyone for your willingness to help. This is one of the best forums I have ever participated in and all I want to say is, "Keep up the great work, guys!". You definitely rock.

Now off to see where to post my next question(s). 8)

Regards,
~Mark :)
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PostPosted: Mon Jun 25, 2012 7:48 pm    Post subject: Re: I <3 Gentoo Reply with quote

first of all: Thank you very much for your post. I fully second that. But I'd like to pick one sentence out, it fully explains at least my addiction to Gentoo and why I always feel, well, sort of "out of place" when I have to work with other distros:
PM17E5 wrote:
Everything just makes sense, and there's rarely ever guess work when it comes to figuring out why something isn't working.
Amen! :D
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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 26, 2012 1:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

These are all excellent points and thanks for sharing them. Definitely one thread I like seeing dug up :). Mark2, it's always nice to see another Linux user who's tried other systems and settled with Gentoo, and who took the time to learn how to use it. I remember I was so excited when I had my first Gentoo system up and running.
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2012 11:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

djdunn wrote:
portage is a godsend, really, I remember back in the 90s how awesome it was to scour the internet for rpm dependencies, from gentoo not only have I gained control in how my systems are configured but also efficiency in the time it takes to not only compile custom software but to easilly update the same software.



Yes custom overlays come in handy and are fairly user friendly.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 11:38 am    Post subject: Re: I <3 Gentoo Reply with quote

I love Gentoo too. :)
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 13, 2012 7:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Me too!
I just came back to Gentoo after a 6 month test of Ubuntu.
Didn't like it..

Been running Gentoo for 8 years or so and it looks like I will continue doing so :D
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 15, 2012 7:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Like the others, I'm starting to fall in live with Gentoo too. I've been an arch linux user for almost 3 years and ~50days ago I nuked it and settled gentoo amd64 on my desktop PC and I really love this Gentoo game, you know it makes me feel like I've never ever felt before with any distro I used to use.

So, let me introduce to you my newbi`sh gentoo killer :p

respect to all gentoo developers for doing a great work which makes what gentoo is. just keep up that way
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 3:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I remember reading somewhere about being able to have multiple versions of the same application on the system, and was sold on that. Given the awesome Portage system, minimalism, rolling release, fallback options, and very deep understanding of the system which results from using Gentoo, and this awesome community, there's isn't any linux distribution that's quite like Gentoo. Iit's what I prefer.
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 17, 2012 5:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I love Gentoo ...
I'm using Gentoo for many server in different institutions and different needs ...
Thanks to Daniel Robbins and All Gentoo Developers ... and All Gentoo users ...
;-)
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2012 11:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I've been using Gentoo since 2006 and I've hardly looked back since. I definitely agree regarding the documentation; I discovered Gentoo by googling the various problems I had back then with SUSE, since many of the results were from gentoo.org and the wiki.

Thanks to all the developers, maintainers etc for their awesome work!
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2012 12:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm on track w/ OP.

I run a vanilla openbox setup on all machines. Speed is unmatched by any competitors.

I'm very spoiled and when I think of binaries that don't have my custom USE flags selected I feel like some kind of noble looking down on peasant distros.

I feel clumsy in GUI based situations, and my friends who think I'm some mega nerd question my skills when I can't find the control panels for networking under ubuntu. But the instant I open their terminal and start to plug CLI they take those thoughts back I'm sure. So Gentoo is a curse and a blessing all in one. :)

I have to keep VMs of ubuntu and mint ( running smooth as butter under gentoo ).

I also love how effortless setting up hardened profiles can be. Much kudos to hardened-devs.

Go Gentoo!
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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 29, 2012 6:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Another Openbox user, awesome :). I think Openbox and gentoo both go hand in hand because they just resemble each other quite a bit when it comes to minimalism. I've even tried the "awesome" window manager, and found it to be a bit too busy for me so I went back to Openbox.

I had a good friend who always ripped on Gentoo and told me how nothing in it ever worked and how all he ever did was maintain it. Of course I do spend a little bit of time maintaining my system too, but I don't understand how some people claim that nothing ever works in it and blame the software instead of themselves for obviously doing something wrong.

It's apparent that there's a lot of people who like a minimalist system that allows you to have greater freedom and lets you do things manually, so every time I see those threads "Gentoo is going to die blah blah blah" I don't even give them much thought any more. If Gentoo were to ever disappear it would leave a pretty big hole in the computing world.
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ViruSzZ wrote:
.....I've been an arch linux user for almost 3 years and ~50days ago I nuked it and settled gentoo amd64 on my desktop PC and I really love this Gentoo game, you know it makes me feel like I've never ever felt before with any distro I used to use.....

respect to all gentoo developers for doing a great work which makes what gentoo is. just keep up that way


I've been maintaining my own "source-based" Archlinux, which of course forced me into closely reading a lot of "pkgbuilds" and adding patches, usually borrowed from Gentoo or from Debian Sid, or sed lines to fix packages for compiling with Arch's bleeding edge toolchain. Of course that has to be done because Archlinux can not rebuild itself; any binary that they created more than a couple of months ago is likely to be unbuildable today using the available pkgbuild. Well, I faced that problem and still enjoyed some of the "manual drive" nature of Arch pkgbuilds, but I've been disappointed in the quality there. Some packages could not possibly have been created with the pkgbuild that they provide. Some are messy. Python is a mess. AUR is ... uhhmm ... not up to Gentoo quality.

Unlike ViruSzZ I haven't nuked my Archlinux partitions -- I have a "work in progress" Archlinux partition, and a Stable Archlinux partition, which is completely self-building with gcc 4.7.1, glibc 2.15, kde 4.8.3 with all of activities & plasma, everything except kdepim, but NO soprano, mysql, akonadi, or kdepimlibs. I've got it running well but I've come to think of Arch as the bumblebee. A careful analysis will prove that it can not fly. I'm amazed at how well it runs considering how it's put together. :cry:

Which is just to give context to my appreciation for the really excellent engineering that goes into the ebuilds and the portage infrastructure for Gentoo (and Funtoo which provided my base system). Wow! I now have a partition with Gentoo that almost exactly replicates my built-from source, stabilized Archlinux and it was a hell of a lot less work to get the Gentoo system built. My experience in building up this complete system, and reading a number of the Gentoo ebuilds, gives me a very good feeling of confidence.

In fact I'm running Gentoo now :) with slim logging me into either my kde, openbox, xmonad or herbstluftwm desktops. I'm very glad to see good work being done on sage-mathematics in the overlay. And pleased to see texlive 2012!! Very impressive.

Thanks for continuing to engineer a great system all these years!
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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 4:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I find your post very interesting, because one of my best friends always claimed how superior Arch was to Gentoo in every way. So this kind of amuses me, seeing someone else's experience with it. It also make sme realize how much I take portage for granted, with the occasional ebuild breakage we get here and there, it's easy to get spoiled and expect a 100% flawless system until we go to other distribustions and see what we've been "missing".
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

PM17E5 wrote:
I find your post very interesting, because one of my best friends always claimed how superior Arch was to Gentoo in every way....


Archlinux would be a good community for a sociologist or psychologist to study cult formation. Seriously. I like it for what it is, but if you read many of the posts to the Arch forums for several months, as I have done, you'll finally get that "Aha!" moment of realizing that people quickly learn to use almost exactly the same words and phrases over and over again, phrases that don't mean a damn thing or are objectively false. There's a tendency to move postings that negate the "cult talk" to the Topics Going Nowhere thread, and then closed. I'm tempted to start trying to list some of those overloaded cult phrases, but I suspect that you know them and I want to avoid the temptation to be sarcastic about it. :roll:


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PM17E5
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 30, 2012 6:28 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Hah! I always wondered why it seemed so popular yet so "empty". When people would say Arch, that's about it. When someone would say Gentoo they'd describe it as a minimalist source based distribution that lets you customize anything you want.
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2012 2:05 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

New Gentoo user, here. I have been using Arch for around 2 years (before that I used Debian and before that Ubuntu).

While setting Gentoo up on EFI seemed like a whole lot of steps, it wasn't particularly difficult, and it's something that was lengthy to set up on Arch Linux (at the time), as well, so it's nothing too new to me.

It seems that Gentoo runs VERY smooth, and the USE flags are the best thing ever invented. Updating everything to reflect the new USE flags is very simple and easy, if time consuming.

Overall, my computer's running great, I don't have a whole lot of crap I never use on it, and battery life is actually pretty good (for a Linux distro, unfortunately Windows has blown it away the day or so I had Windows on my laptop), having not spent much time at all trying to optimize it.
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