"Are we losing users to Gentoo?"

[darktux]

* To: debian-devel@lists.debian.org
* Subject: Are we losing users to Gentoo?
* From: Andrew Lau <netsnipe@debianplanet.org>
* Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2002 20:50:32 +1100
* Old-return-path: <netsnipe@debianplanet.org>
* Sender: Andrew Lau <netsnipe@debianplanet.org>
* User-agent: Mutt/1.4i

Read the post and the rest of the thread at this address: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/20 ... 01974.html

(thanks Xsl for pointing this out to me)

[mooman]

Wow. Lots of interesting comments in that thread.. I read nearly all of it. Here are some of the choice bits:

More friendly to newcomers (in my opinion)

I think debian is stagnating technically and that our social structure is the cause of it.
We have a lot of technically talented people, if we worked together we
could overcome any technical problem, but how often does it happen ?

Gentoo's growth is a sign that they are doing something right, if we cant even recognise that fact then its pointless continuing this conversation.

But the one and only thing why i'm using Gentoo: It contains more Software for the Desktop which i need. I don't have to download mplayer manually or add an apt-source to get KDE3!

It's easy to grow when there's nowhere to go but up.
Debian hit the knee in the growth curve a few years ago, most likely.
Gentoo has yet to hit it. But they *will* hit it.

And if they don't, well, then we'll need to take a look and see what we
can learn from them.

It *is* good enough. Gentoo surely is a good distro, but I believe
that 50% of their users are in only for the hype. It's a fashion, and Debian
isn't about fashions.

[rac]

It seems to me that the place gentoo really innovates in not in
optimizations, but in conditional compilation. I understand that you can
build a gentoo system with just gnome, or without any gnome libraries,
or with gnome and kde, for instance. This is an area debian does not do
at all well in.

I totally concur. USE flags are the technical feature of Portage that brought me here from Debian. The political reasons are described here.

[simulacrum]

Having myself been a Slackware user for the past few years, I can identify alot with what was said regarding Gentoo being a hype driven fashion of the moment distro. Occassionally I hang out on #slackware and recently had a conversation about Gentoo.

A point I found particularly intersting was that a few years ago when Linux begain gaining in popularity Slack was the 1337 distro to use. All the cool people had to use it and it gained a lot of popularity as a result. General consensus among the people I was talking to was that Gentoo is enjoying the same fame, but that it will die down, or out.

To be honest, it took a lot from me to give Gentoo a try. I like Slackware a lot, and I'm not even sure that I'll stick with Gentoo. Granted it's still linux, but there's a lot to learn: system init, service management, etc. It'll be a long time before Slack ever leaves my server, that's for sure. But what I have seen, I really like. I like Portage, compiling all binaries, and being forced to install only what you need.

The biggest factor though, has been development and community. Perhaps the biggest knocking point for Slack is its far and few releases. When I started investigating Gentoo, I was astounded at how current all the available packages were, how you could keep them up to date, and I really like the forum. A large community of users specific to this distro ready and willing to help, not being restricted to off-and-on IRC chats.

[uncle_meat]

Hmmm, I've often found myself running the "31337" distros, but only because they happened to be the best solution for me at the time. I used to use Linux as a server only... Slackware (and later, Debian) were good choices for me. Now I'm seriously using Linux on the desktop for the second time - the first time was with SuSE. This time around, the Linux UI seems a lot more responsive. It actually feels like a Windows machine in that respect.

I probably would've gone with Debian if I could've gotten it to work on my hardware... Debian is what I know. But the performance of Gentoo and the openness of the developer/user community is forcing me to rearrange my prejudices.

[EzInKy]

Yes, I've been following that thread for a while now...even brought it up here myself before http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php? ... highlight=
I couldn't help but get the feeling the computing just isn't fun for those guys anymore.

[pem725]

I'm on my 4th distro since 1993 - slack, redhat, mandrake, and now gentoo - and I can tell you that support and cutting edge have lured me to gentoo. Don't know how long I'll stay but I really do enjoy the forums. As far as debian, I installed it several times over the years and liked what I saw but I can say one thing about the debian community (no flame war please) they were not as helpful or friendly as the gentoo crowd. I got more RTFM's in one day than I could possibly stand. To date, not one useless suggestion from the gentoo crowd. Keep it up and thanks for your efforts.

[Lovechild]

Compiling from scratch is really hyped, what makes Gentoo cool is the technical merits like rc-updating and USE flags.

[Evangelion]

Is it just me, or are some of those Debian-guys a bit arrogant?

[exhilaration]

I didn't need to create an account here for three weeks and through two separate installations because of the massive wealth of information I could access through searching.

I was blown away at the patience that you guys have shown with newbies. While searching, I'd find that the same question had been asked 15 times, yet instead of the RTFM responses I was expecting, I found polite links to previous discussions.

YOU GUYS ROCK!

It's nice that everything is compiled from scratch, but what I was looking in a distro for was a stupid-easy installation tool. After having dealt with Red Hat's RPM, and knowing of Debian's multi-year lag, Gentoo was the natural choice.

I'm not going anywhere.

[progster]

I found it funny that they are considering (and working on) an alternative source based system and gentoo users are thinking about an alternative binary based system. Other then that I found the following responses very interesting:

It seems to me that the place gentoo really innovates in not in
optimizations, but in conditional compilation. I understand that you can
build a gentoo system with just gnome, or without any gnome libraries,
or with gnome and kde, for instance. This is an area debian does not do
at all well in.
They also have a modern init system from what I've heard, something that
we are not exactly close to getting (hmh is doing some good work, but
it's rather overdesigned too in trying to support every possible init
system, instead of just picking one very good one and moving over to
it)

I have heard that as well, and gentoo has some freedom in experimenting with such things because they are starting from scratch (likewise for using the latest gcc, etc.). They do not need to be concerned about compatibility, upgrades, stability, or difficult transitions. Nobody that I know is running Gentoo on a production server, and the desktop users expect such things because it is a relatively new system.

Hmm, I've tried Gentoo 1.2 (from stage 1) cause of there's no i686
Debian tree. I've tried, nothing more - I'm still using Debian
stable for my servers and testing for my workstation. As well as
you start from stage 3 - the compile time takes longer as the
speedup saves time .. that's my opinion. I mean take X .. it takes
1 hour to compile (guess) on my Athlon 1,4 GHz. In a half year there
is a new release and I've to compile again. Does the performance
boost of 10%-20% bring in the difference between 4 minutes
installation on Debian and 1 Hour with gentoo. Imagine your system
is a PIII 500 ... and you only have X!

~Progster

[progster]

Is it just me, or are some of those Debian-guys a bit arrogant?

I thought the same thing, but it's something you see in every mailing list I think...

~Progster

[charlieg]

I think a quote from this message sums it up.

Hell yes, and it's great. The number of morons using Debian has
noticably decreased since gentoo came on the scene; they now have
something that will give them the stupid things they asked for, so
they stop asking us for them.

If you take that attitude to new users then, hell yes, you don't deserve them.

We were all new users once. Just like we were all kids once. That's why I like Gentoo's up-to-date and explicit docs. That's why I like Gentoo's friendly community on irc, in the mail lists, and in the forums. That's why I like Gentoo's developers attitude to developing a distribution that intelligently empowers the user. That's why I like Gentoo.

To be honest, people like that guy make me sick. I've been doing Thai Boxing for a year now, which makes me fairly adept at most aspects of the sport. If he were to come for his first lesson at the gym I'd hit him in the face and call him a moron for not knowing how to defend himself.

[henke]

To be honest, people like that guy make me sick. I've been doing Thai Boxing for a year now, which makes me fairly adept at most aspects of the sport. If he were to come for his first lesson at the gym I'd hit him in the face and call him a moron for not knowing how to defend himself.

ROFL

I also agree with the other stuff that that charlieg says.

[KiTaSuMbA]

Elitism is a Bad Thing (TM)! I'm too annoyed by people that behave like they were born with a Unix manual in their hands.
Bahh... let them stay on the corner alone, happy with their extraordinary computing knowledges...

[sgaap]

pfft, I just migrated from debian to gentoo about 4 months ago, just because debian unstable/testing was lagging behind, when trying gentoo I not only noticed that it was faster and more up-to-date but more importent: the software seems to work better if you compile it yourself, the only thing I miss (a bit) is debconf

Still using debian on my router though, but I did change my divx/pc -tv setup from debian to gentoo

[Evangelion]

Hmm, I've tried Gentoo 1.2 (from stage 1) cause of there's no i686
Debian tree. I've tried, nothing more - I'm still using Debian
stable for my servers and testing for my workstation. As well as
you start from stage 3 - the compile time takes longer as the
speedup saves time .. that's my opinion. I mean take X .. it takes
1 hour to compile (guess) on my Athlon 1,4 GHz. In a half year there
is a new release and I've to compile again. Does the performance
boost of 10%-20% bring in the difference between 4 minutes
installation on Debian and 1 Hour with gentoo. Imagine your system
is a PIII 500 ... and you only have X!

~Progster

I'm currently isntalling Gentoo from stage 1 on 300Mhz laptop with 128 megs of RAM. And the compilation is not an issue. That guy sounds like he plans to do all the compiling during the time he would normally be using the computer. Why not do like I did? I started the bootstrap when I was on my way to bed. In the morning, it was finished. Before I went to work, I emerged system. When I got back home, it was done. X and Fluxbox were both installed during the night, no problems there. I didn't lose any time compiling all that software.

[Lovechild]

So we are the Debian elite rejects?

[carambola5]

Hrmm....

Code: Select all

me@workstation$ diff http://www.opensource.org/halloween/halloween1.php http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/debian-devel-200211/msg01974.html
me@workstation$

Interesting.

Anyone else see the similarities?

[Jester]

As far as the "hype" goes, I don't think that's true in all cases. I didn't come here for the hype. What attracted me to Gentoo was Portage and the fact that it allowed me to install just the stuff I wanted, rather than getting all the other crap that I didn't need like I did with Redhat. It wasn't about what was popular at all; it was about usability and choice and optimization for me, but that's just for me....

[charlieg]

...honestly it was a mixture of hype and recommendation from a friend that brought me to Gentoo.

But that was 4 months ago and my system will be Gentoo for the forseeable future. Considering Mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 didn't last a month between them on my PC, that shows that there is some substance to the hype.

I did originally want to try debian, but due to my newbity and Debian's let's make it difficult to get the isos and install attitude, I skipped straight to Gentoo. I have to say I'm glad I did.

[bleakcabal]

I admit I was only drawn into Gentoo because of the hype, the cool logo, the name and to show off to my friends

[Tournesol]

I came to Linux through various Mandrake/Red Hat distros. Because I grew frustrated with RPM, in Dec. 2001, I started using LFS. I learned a lot from it.
LFS is great but it lacks a proper package management system. So , one or two months ago, I started to look for a new distro. My final 2 choices were between Debian and Gentoo. After reading their documentation, visiting different websites, I decided to use Gentoo. So far, I am not disappointed. I really like Portage. I found the forums and documentation useful.

I will certainly like to try Debian someday .... but right now, as long as I am happy with Gentoo, I will continue to use it.

[Praxxus]

I essentially started using Gentoo because my ....ing KDE clock would never show the right time in Red Hat.

. . . and Mandrake's munged menu system ticks me off.

. . . and I have enough of the RPM dependency hell at work.

. . . and I liked the idea of running an entire system that wasn't compiled for a 386.

. . . and a friend of mine highly recommended it (thanks Sam!).

. . . and the install docs were great.

Like someone else mentioned above, it took me a few weeks to create a forum account, because so many of the answers I needed were already there, in a friendly, helpful manner. In fact, I think I finally signed up so I could help answer questions too.

I have never tried Debian. I've run SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, Mandrake, Mandrake, Mandrake, Mandrake, and RedHat (as opposed to work, which is RedHat, RedHat, and RedHat).

I don't plan on running Debian, as long as Gentoo is around. In fact, I'm twisting my brain, trying to think of an excuse to put one of our "production servers" on Gentoo.

Oh, and my KDE clock works now, too.

[solatis]

Why *SHOULDN'T* you put a production server on gentoo?

I mean, THOSE things should perform REALLY well, and gentoo is just the thing that does that...