Gentoo has come a long way BUT I wish it had...

Message

Chiron · Post by **Chiron** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 12:22 am

paulpach wrote:
miqorz wrote: And by your defenition anything you can see is a freakin' GUI..
It is not my definition. Here are a few definitions of GUI. None mention X. In fact, according to most, many ncurses based applications can be considered GUIs.

In scanning just the page that you linked, paulpach, every one of those definitions lists graphical representations of commands and files as being central to a GUI. So ncurses , framebuffer, Midnight Commander, etc, definitely do not qualify as being GUI, as there is no graphical component to them.

Arker · Post by **Arker** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 12:37 am

It appears nobody is gettin' my point, so I'm outta here. We've degraded into just another thread again.

Cheers,
~djc

miqorz · Post by **miqorz** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 3:52 am

And this is why some people should just buy a Mac and get the hell off Linux.

Like my opinion or not? I really don't care.

dgt84 · Post by **dgt84** » Sat Sep 11, 2004 4:07 pm

miqorz wrote:Want a front end? Make it.

This is what I am doing.

Chiron wrote:But even within the membership of the Gentoo forums there is enough divergence of opinion on various aspects of Gentoo to clearly show it would be impossible to please everyone. And if there is such a wide range of thought within the groups of people who actually use Gentoo, why is it so hard to believe that Gentoo is "not for everyone", just like beer, turnips, asparagus, operas, etc, are not for everyone.

You make a great point. My tools are more to please a specific crowd, one that is quite vocal on the forums requesting GUI tools, but they will not steal Gentoo away. Perhaps you are right, I shouldn't try to make Gentoo for "everyone." Right now I am just trying to make Gentoo for them.

supernovus wrote:The Gentoo community used to have a reputation for being open minded, friendly people. Posts like this and some of the others starting to pop up are seriously going to damage that reputation - if it's not too late already. Many here complain about the Debian crowd as being elitist bastards, and here we are, becoming just like them.

I just think the above needs to be repeated.

castorilo · Post by **castorilo** » Sun Sep 12, 2004 2:23 am

Thank you dgt84. As you probably already know, there are many people here that appreciate your work.

Just out of curiosity. What exactly are you working on?

dol-sen · Post by **dol-sen** » Sun Sep 12, 2004 4:01 pm

look at his signature.

SalsaDoom · Post by **SalsaDoom** » Sun Sep 12, 2004 5:37 pm

Ok.. yeah, this as degenerated a good deal.

But all you gui people -- your missing the point. The great point these guys are trying to make is simply that people who don't want to read documentation really shouldn't be using linux.

I recomend different linux distros to different people. People I think are 'computer people', who know how to read documentation I point them to Gentoo. People who are just 'users' I point to suse for fedora.

Here is an observation that should not be new to any of you: Linux people in general do not like answering the same questions multiple times.

Go on irc and test this out 'live' if you like. All your "lets be friendly to everyone!" sentiment is purely your own and not held by the average linux user -- as a general rule, he is interested in helping people who are willing to help themselves. Only.

I've spent a good deal of time on irc helping people out with thier problems for no other reason then its a Good Thing (tm) to do. But I make sure that they've investigated the problem themselves, otherwise I point them off to a place to look for documentation and tell them, "If you don't find the answer there, come find me then."

What the anti-gui guys are worried about, and I admit I am concerned about too, is that the unthreatening installer will encourage people who are not willing to learn for themselves to pour onto the forums and fill it with questions that have been answered a thousand times previously. Gentoo's community is exceptionally helpful and friendly, but they are not suckers who want to spend all their time answering the same questions.

I've always felt that Gentoo's installer was a good defence against the worst of these people, because to even install Gentoo, you get exposed to a lot of good solid documentation. If someone cannot follow this extremely well written and easy to follow documentation, then they are not going to have a a satisfactory Gentoo (or Linux!) experience.

All questions should be prodecded by : Search on http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml -> Search on forums.gentoo.org -> search on google.com -> now post, and mention the above efforts. At this point, even if you've missed the fix, at least you looked and no one will be upset.

And you know what? I don't think its wrong to expect people to do that.

--SD

djm · Post by **djm** » Sun Sep 12, 2004 10:29 pm

On the one hand, the old saying

If you want <insert name of whatever here>, you know where to find it

But on the other hand, Gentoo is supposed to be about choice

Think about what a GUI installer would bring to the Gentoo community though - lots of users who don't want to search google/these forums with installed but not fully functional Gentoo systems wanting people to tell them exactly what to do and getting annoyed when it doesn't happen straight away. Popularity comes with a price. Maybe this is elitist, but plenty of cliches about the right tool for the right job, and not reinventing the wheel seem to apply here

An installation program that does things like work out your USE flags for you (as, apparently, it should do) is a massive undertaking, which in my opinion isn't worth the time of the gentoo devs, unless there were more of them (though obviously it's not my opinion that counts, but I can't see it happening anytime soon)

castorilo · Post by **castorilo** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 2:29 am

metal leper wrote: Think about what a GUI installer would bring to the Gentoo community though - lots of users who don't want to search google/these forums with installed but not fully functional Gentoo systems wanting people to tell them exactly what to do and getting annoyed when it doesn't happen straight away. Popularity comes with a price. Maybe this is elitist, but plenty of cliches about the right tool for the right job, and not reinventing the wheel seem to apply here

The people who the installer would bring, like you say, won't likelly contribute in terms of development, but a fraction of them will give donations, and developers will keep gentoo in mind more often just because it has a bigger user base.

Consider Red Hat. As bad as their package manager is, people keep releasing rpm's when they release their applications. If gentoo was as popular as Red Hat, and getting newbies is the way to get there, developers would start releasing ebuilds with their applications and making sure their application ran fine under gentoo, just like they do today with Red Hat. Developers would install gentoo just to be able to support their user base, and these are exactly the type of people you want installing gentoo because they are more likelly to contribute.

Every single peace of software that you use makes some tasks easier and reduces the amount of learning you have to do. For example bash allows you to start programs withought having to learn about executable file formats, process management, system calls and a lot of things. Bash is a front end for your operating system.

Using portage, you can install apache and have a fully functioning web server with ssl in just one command. You don't have to learn anything about http, compilers, ssl, apache modules, or any of that that a normal web administrator would have to know. Note the administrator still can learn those things if he wants to. A Gui installer would not be much different from portage in the sense that it will make software installation easier, and reduce the required learning. I would think that if you use gentoo, you like portage, so please answer the following question: Why is it ok to install a web server withought any learning, but it is not ok to have a laptop working withought learning?

Gentoo is not there to teach people. As I mentioned before, gentoo is there to make lives easier. So a GUI installer would fit gentoo nicelly, especially if it is optional to please both the pros and the newbies.

miqorz · Post by **miqorz** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:39 am

Odd. GUI config tools and installers allways made my life a living hell, not easier.

That's why I USE Gentoo.

placeholder · Post by **placeholder** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 3:55 am

miqorz wrote:Odd. GUI config tools and installers allways made my life a living hell, not easier.

That's why I USE Gentoo.

They have many times for me as well, but some people do indeed like them. I say that if we could get a stronger user base by making a GUI installer, then go ahead as long as nobody *has* to use it.

kavau · Post by **kavau** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:27 am

Lokheed wrote:Aslong as there are people like him and myself and the countless others that refuse to be drummed down with GUIs, I think there is still hope...

In the year 2004, all of the Linux world had been conquered by the evil GUI overlords... except for a tiny distribution named Gentoo, where the Rebel Alliance valiantly holds on to the power and virtues of the command line...

I have to stop reading this thread, or I'll die from laughing. All this talk about GUI fans poisoning the Gentoo community is just so ridiculous. If you want complete control over everything on your system, maybe Gentoo is the wrong distro for you. You should try LFS instead. Fact is, Gentoo comes with some wonderful tools to make life easier for its users: the bootstrap scripts and emerge, for example. Most people use xf86config or a similar tool to set up X, instead of writing their X configuration from scratch. Each time you use such a tool, you're giving up control for convenience. If we all would fiddle around with every detail, we'd never get anywhere.

Gentoo is about having an install and upgrade system that works. It's about a great, supportive community. It's about having a large software repository, and about never having to upgrade your entire system at once. Those are the things that brought me and many other people to Gentoo. It's too bad that people like you guys poison the friendly community with their infantile elitist thinking. Have you ever read through the SuSE newsgroups? Nobody there is asking "where do I have to click..." or similar stuff. It's mostly intelligent questions and intelligent answers, like here on Gentoo (with the exception of this thread), despite SuSE being a GUI distro.

As others have said before on this thread, Linux is about choice. And so is Gentoo. If there are people with the desire and ability to create GUI tools, Gentoo will have GUI tools. Instead of whining about GUI work drawing developers away from the "essential" things, why don't you hop in and help improving the core system? Then everybody can be happy.

Do you have X installed on your system? If the command line is so much better, why waste so much hard disk space and memory on a graphical desktop? Well, I guess some things are just more pleasant to do in a GUI. For many people, system administration is one of them. To insist on doing all installation and system administration tasks in the commandline is living in the past. Let's make Gentoo a modern distro.

Luckily the vast majority of Gentoo users is a very friendly and open-minded crowd.

Promit · Post by **Promit** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:31 am

Ugh, to hell with this place. I'll post in the technical areas when Gentoo breaks, but actually arguing with you people is like arguing with a reinforced concrete wall. You people are hopeless.

thechris · Post by **thechris** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 5:33 am

ironically, the upgrade system in gentoo doesn't work all that well. Before you start saying STFU, realize that i have written a portage wrapper to get some of the features i complain about:

package specific cflags, use flags, and gcc-selection. why?
1.) avr-libc won't compile with -march. so i need a different set of cflags...
2.) some apps compile fine with -ffast-math, others don't same with -fnew-ra. so i can choose to update with it and break the system/fail, or leave it out and lose a little optimization.
3.) gftp has a gui with the gtk option, but i don't want global gtk support, only gtk for one package...
4.) some apps won't compile with gcc3.5 or 3.4. so if an app that fails with gcc3.4 comes up i fail my upgrade...

my wrapper currently will allow me to have package specific make.conf files, a packages.gcc, and a way of pruning out cflags so i can use gcc3.4 cflags and gcc3.3 cflags in the same line without worry of some mess up. however I have issues with blocked, downgraded, and masked packages as well as error handeling and an issue where changing cflags in make.conf doesn't change cflags in the package specific make.confs.

I wish there were GUI tools though. I currently have kdesu kate as my GUI tool -- i can open up config files in a GUI text editor...

there are too many docs for linux. I like things to work. like sudo. doens't work at all. why? its in the docs, but i'm not gonna read it. I just use kdesu because it does exactly what I want and i don't have to read a book on setting up sudoers or whatever. I guess sudo has more features, but so what? i don't plan to use these features on a daily basis and don't see the point in having to learn everything about every program on my comptuer...

djm · Post by **djm** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 9:07 am

Some random thoughts on what people have said since my last post:

@Paulpach

You can't compare Gentoo to Red Hat. RH provide an enterprise solution (and a desktop solution that's now in the form of Fedora), which costs a lot of money, AND they provide support (RHEL only). Gentoo is never likely to do as well as RH in the server market, and will probably never be as popular as a corporate solution. Why? RH charges people money, and this makes companies feel safe - how on earth can a free OS be as good as one they have to pay for? Gentoo doesn't provide the same level of support. As great as these forums are, they aren't what J Random Company thinks support is - they want to be able to phone someone up, or at least email them, and get answers to their problems, or have someone come and fix it. RH provides certification and support, Gentoo doesn't

@kavau

Yes, using IM programs, and surfing the internet, listening to music, watching videos are all easier on a desktop (you can have a lot more stuff on your screen at the same time for a start). But, I still try to do as much stuff as possible using the command line. Maybe I'm living in the past, but in my opinion a GUI front end can only be at best as powerful as a command line tool, and for most things if it was it'd get very cumbersome and cluttered. More often than not, the GUI front end isn't as powerful, once you know what you're doing

I can't argue with anything thechris said though

I'm not completely against a(n optional) GUI installer for Gentoo, but I find it worrying, kind of like I half want linux to get more and more popular, but I'm also worried about what the consequences will be

Edit: I forgot to say that you don't need portage or any other package management system to be able to run an apache server without knowing what you're doing, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea to run one without knowing what you're doing (not that I don't do it, but still...)

castorilo · Post by **castorilo** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 12:32 pm

metal leper wrote:Some random thoughts on what people have said since my last post:

@Paulpach

You can't compare Gentoo to Red Hat. RH provide an enterprise solution (and a desktop solution that's now in the form of Fedora), which costs a lot of money, AND they provide support (RHEL only). Gentoo is never likely to do as well as RH in the server market, and will probably never be as popular as a corporate solution. Why? RH charges people money, and this makes companies feel safe - how on earth can a free OS be as good as one they have to pay for? Gentoo doesn't provide the same level of support. As great as these forums are, they aren't what J Random Company thinks support is - they want to be able to phone someone up, or at least email them, and get answers to their problems, or have someone come and fix it. RH provides certification and support, Gentoo doesn't

I wasn't comparing them at all. My point was:

The more popular gentoo is, the more developers gentoo will have.

I only mentioned Red Hat as an example of that statement being put to practice. Forget that I ever mentioned Red Hat. The above statement is true even if there was no redhat.

kavau · Post by **kavau** » Mon Sep 13, 2004 4:01 pm

metal leper wrote:Yes, using IM programs, and surfing the internet, listening to music, watching videos are all easier on a desktop (you can have a lot more stuff on your screen at the same time for a start). But, I still try to do as much stuff as possible using the command line. Maybe I'm living in the past, but in my opinion a GUI front end can only be at best as powerful as a command line tool, and for most things if it was it'd get very cumbersome and cluttered. More often than not, the GUI front end isn't as powerful, once you know what you're doing

I can't argue with anything thechris said though

I'm not completely against a(n optional) GUI installer for Gentoo, but I find it worrying, kind of like I half want linux to get more and more popular, but I'm also worried about what the consequences will be

I agree with you on most points. A GUI front end will never be more powerful as the command line, simply because it provides a limited number of options. Furthermore, it shouldn't be more powerful, since this would force people to use it and we really would arrive in Windoze World.

GUI tools should be strictly optional; as frontends to command line tools. I just don't share the fears of a lot of people here, that GUI tools would attract dumb users and therefore dumb down Gentoo in the long run.

I was a SuSE user for many years before I came to Gentoo, and my impressions of the SuSE help forums are very positive. The questions were all valid questions, and people were generally not afraid to use the command line for things that couldn't be done in a GUI.

I think the reason some people are so defensive about GUI tools (not talking about you here, metal leper, the people I'm talking about should know who I mean) is that they are in fear of using their 1337 status once Gentoo becomes easy enough for the masses.

ennoia · Post by **ennoia** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 7:13 am

This is getting a bit silly.

If Gentoo could be 100% GUI from the LiveCD to the desktop (of your choice of course), How would that hurt anyone? Obviously the choice for command line will always be there for people who don't like GUI, but how does opening the doors to more people hurt a community?

I think it would be cool to be able to go from stage1 to a DE or WM without ever having to see the console, and have it do it well. That, to me, would be quite the accomplishment. As long as it doesn't replace the existing methods, but instead is offered merely as another option.

You'll excuse me if I am a bit confused, but it seems to me that a community thrives best with more people in it. I don't how that letting people who don't like (or want to take the time) to install Gentoo via command line is going to do anything negative at all to the community. If such an interface existed most of the people I work with would probably be using it, be happy with it, be off windows, and start learning. And if they didn't start learning, they would still be using Gentoo.

Isn't that what we all really want? We are all proud Gentoo users here, and part of that pride should have us wanting to extend the reach of Gentoo to more people regardless of their race, language, age, and yes, technical expertise.

Now, for those of you who say "Go use a different distro" - I say the same thing to you. Gentoo is about choice, about a good community, and about a solid, reliable, and exciting to use Linux distribuition.

If you want to be an elitist prick go find a distro that meets your goals, because Gentoo is the wrong distro for that.

Zeddicus · Post by **Zeddicus** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 8:02 am

ennoia wrote: I think it would be cool to be able to go from stage1 to a DE or WM without ever having to see the console, and have it do it well. That, to me, would be quite the accomplishment. As long as it doesn't replace the existing methods, but instead is offered merely as another option.

Exactly. What would be the harm in an option at the beginning -- F2 for command line installation, F1 for graphical?

Hell, if I could get something along those lines that would get me a working system with X/etc up in less than an hour, I'd be elated. I'm perfectly capable of installing Gentoo -- I've done it more than my share of times. However... it's not exactly 'fun'. It'd be damn nice to have a simplification of the install. Again, no one is forcing you into anything, but I can't see why having the option could possibly be a bad thing.

It's just like saying idiotic stuff like -- 'emerge is for people who don't feel like RTFMing like everyone else, check the dependencies moron!'. Why would you want to worry about dependencies if a program can take care of it for you?

isnogood · Post by **isnogood** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 12:28 pm

For the love of whatever - don't go and waste recources with stuff that nobody needs.Whoever does need gui installers can go and use Debian or contribute to and/or use vidalinux.Gentoo is already getting buggier by the day because there is too much stuff halfcooked.

ennoia · Post by **ennoia** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:27 pm

How is that wasting resources on stuff that nobody needs? Obviously some people need it, or this thread wouldn't exist.

Are you so self important as to think that if you don't need it, nobody does?

Gentoo's goals are to make peoples lives in Linux easier and more pleasant, it's not here to make you feel like some CLI leet hax0r. If you prefer the CLI way of doing things (which in most cases, I do also) that's fine for you, but saying that there should be no other option is just arrogant.

Why deny others the joy of using this great distro, just beacuse they are not as "leet" as you?

miqorz · Post by **miqorz** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:42 pm

By making it accessable, it's thus changeing it in a very bad way, thus making it not the greatest distro.

What's the point of making gui front-ends to apps that still aren't fully ready in command line mode in the first place?

Debian users got along for a long time without synaptic and many of them still don't use it.

isnogood · Post by **isnogood** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:48 pm

No reason to get ugly.
I just happen to think that if somebody doesn't want to even read the install docs gentoo might not be right distro.Of course there are no other distros around.

msimplay · Post by **msimplay** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:25 pm

I gotta say theres a lot of down right arrogant people on this forum
I love Gentoo the way it is

but it seems to me that arrogant people unwilling to listen to anything just to keep their so called elite status

Its these people that keep linux from being available to the masses and it seems to me that these are the very people that will leave linux and go to another OS as soon as it does become as popular and supported as say windows

djm · Post by **djm** » Tue Sep 14, 2004 6:33 pm

I hate to burst your bubble, but most computer users are too afraid to install windows, lot alone linux.. in fact most computer users are scared of doing things a lot less drastic than installing an OS, and even slightly more competant ones wouldn't want to have to install windows

I even had one friend (who's reasonably intelligent, and uses a computer a lot) who didn't want to format his drive, "in case he did it wrong" !

That's what keeps linux away from the masses

The same people who you think are arrogant, are usually glad to help those newbies who have tried to help themselves, and don't want spoonfeeding