Thanks for Gentoo

[cweiske]

I am using Gentoo for over 3 years now, and did have many problems. After all, I have to say that most of the problems were caused by myself doing things wrong, or by myself because of not knowing things enough.
The forums and documentation of Gentoo are just great, and I nearly everytime found an answer here.

I do like Gentoo because it really lets you decide the things you want to have and tweak all the tiny bits and pieces. The big downside everybody sees is that you have to compile and configure everything by yourself. But after having tried several other distributions (ubuntu/kubutu, debian, suse), I see the huge benefit of all that: You know how to do things, you know where to fix things, you generally just know where to start.

With every other distribution I came to the point of leaving from the "normal" path of doing things and wanting to go deeper, install crazy things or just configure programs they way they were not foreseen by the distribution makers. With most other distributions, you are simply stuck because there are nearly no people knowing what happens below the surface.
In Gentoo, on the other side, you do know what you are doing and where to spin the screws because you already saw the config files at least once when installing. Having a good memory helps here, but in case you don't have it the forums are the place to find the lost ones.

Of course there are times I cursed the gentoo people for not having the latest version of $foo in portage or having some broken ebuilds I absolutely needed. But when thinking of the greater times when everything is just working (the gentoo install on my main computer is 3 years old, and I did not reinstall it since the first setup), the bad things vanish. After all, it's driven by volunteers - and the result is just great.

Thank you, Gentoo devs and Forum answerers.

[wah]

Great testimonial!

I agree with all of what you say, and I feel that I cannot say it enough!

Cheers,
W.

[Itazuki]

Yeah I agree as well. In the past all the problems I've had were mainly due to me being misinformed and not thinking things through when I was configuring them (like etc-updates overwriting important stuff cuz i did it fast and didn't focus on what I was doing heh). Nowadays I can't even remember the last major problem I've had with Gentoo. Whereas my Windows 2000 O/S (sorry but I've gotta play my NHL and games and stuff) just bluescreened like 30 minutes ago heh. So yeah, Gentoo is an amazing O/S that gets better everyday. So yeah, Gentoo-Devs rock.

[welp]

Of course there are times I cursed the gentoo people for not having the latest version of $foo in portage or having some broken ebuilds I absolutely needed.

File a bug about it: http://bugs.gentoo.org

[broken_chaos]

Indeed! Gentoo, for any small problems it may have, is by far the friendly-est distro for anyone who wants to have control of their system. I love being able to build exactly what I want, and nothing more. I've had distros like Debian want to install half of X11 for a server setup (web + mail + IRC server, mainly). With Gentoo, I just have what I want, and nothing more. And I like it like that!

So, thanks to all the great Gentoo devs, and the great community!

[steveL]

++ Gentoo rocks, the community is fantastic, the devs work their arses off and the distribution is simply the best OS available IMNSHO.

Having said that, I'm dying to try BSD, but I believe there's gentoo-freebsd or something in any case, and I can't see me running a different desktop ATM than the default KDE in gentoo.

[only2sea]

I'm a Gentoo n00b, I've installed Gentoo on my system about 4 months ago. My Linux experience is almost nothing. I've only used cygwin on Windows for my school homework, and PuTTY SSH terminal for 2 semesters. After that I tried installing Debian Woody on my own system but I've failed to start up X. So my debian experience on my own system was only 3 days.

During 2 years of mandatory military service, I couldn't even try linux shell. But I've read Gentoo documentation in the late days of service. I installed Gentoo on my system last September, of course I had many problem. Gentoo really helped me with itself, documents, forum, and gentoo-wiki. Nowadays already I have much fewer problems, and moreover I'm getting to know where the problem is, though I still don't know most of stuffs right now, REAL newbie.

I think I made an excellent decision to use Gentoo. I thought Gentoo would give me much pain. But it didn't actually. Yes. Every stupid situation was due to me and will be due to me if it happens. I don't know about other distros. But at least I can say that source based centralized package manager really rocks!!! Yeah it really rocks. Do you agree with me too?

Oh, English is completely foreign language for me. Forum also provide good service, you may not guess. It also helps my language training. I mean HUMAN language.

[waakner]

I also want thank all Gentoo devs for the remarkable work you do. I have been using little bit over 1.5 years now and during that time I have encountered only a very few problems, which all were resolved quite fast. Actually I'm really surprised how easy it has been to maintain Gentoo system and it is the only distro, where I can maintain stable system packages with bleeding multimedia applications, all managed by package manager. I have tried same with all mainsream distros, but always encountered package conflicts because you have to use different third party repositories.

[rsborn]

I have been using Gentoo for a few years and have become very comfortable with it. I will admit that if these forums didn't exist I probably would not have stayed but they are so quick at helping you solve problems that there really isn't an issue.

My original reason for coming to Gentoo was the resurrection of a Sparc Ultra 10. Gentoo seemed to be the best distro for the Sparc after that I was hooked. There has been some rough times, the transition to modular X and gcc4.1.1 were almost more than I could bear but this Ultra is still kickin thanks to the guys over in the SPARC forum (weeve and ferris, thanks).

My latest Gentoo adventure is distributing Gentoo based VMWare images to some of our business partners to save them the hassle of maintaining a separate linux box for one task. Since I can pick and choose packages to the Nth degree with Gentoo it works out perfectly since ideally this image needs to fit onto a CD (in an archive so far, not sure I could get away with a 700 meg drive). Gentoo on VMWare (and VirtualPC for that matter) seems to work flawlessly and is relatively easy to maintain since I only update packages as necessary, no --update world for me too often.

anyways, thanks for a great distro and an even better set of forums,

Rick