Gentoo users == a bunch of closed-minded elitists?

[curtis119]

I know this thread is just so we can all bitch but here is my 2 cents.

This is the only Linux forum I have ever been in that the users give each other help with OTHER OS's. I have read so many threads that are all about how to accomplish something in Windows or Redhat or Debian or Slackware or whatever. I mean come on, we help people with Windows problems!! OK, sure, we may tease them a little but we give good, valid advice.

I have seen a 'few' noobie's being bashed in their obviously noobie posts but others very quickly jump into the thread and help out. In most cases I usually see a link to other forum posts that will answer the question and a 'friendly' reminder that the search function is your friend. Along with a warm welcome! This is not elitism. This is people from all over the world, speaking how many different languages?, helping each other out and teaching each other. This what the Free Software/Open Source movement is all about.

I've also noticed that a lot of us use more than just Gentoo. I, for instance, also use Slackware and LRP (and Windows at work). Lovechild is notorious for trying every new distro or update to a distro known to man(and woman).

Gentooists cover every political, religious and socioeconomic group under the sun. And we discuss it all to death. But we do it in a friendly grown up way(mostly ). Note the threads on gay marriage, the existance of god, elections from every country, womens issues, the (Boo Bush!) war on Iraq, abortion, euthenasia(spelling?), fashion, movies, television, books, video games and just about anything else a human brain can think up.

This is not a group of elitists. This is a group of human beings from around the world who have come together to have fun and to help build a great GNU/Linux distribution. Notice I didn't say 'The Best', I said 'Great'. Although I do think it is 'one of the best'.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the subject.

[GENTOO_GOD]

Are we really acting like elitists? Or are they just full of envy?

Yes. I am GOD.

[ebrostig]

All I can say to the arch forum:

Thank you!

You guys gave a good laugh and made my day. Please continue down that path and stay away from Gentoo

Erik

[Suicidal]

Oid wrote:

My question is, have they tried gentoo themselves, and if not, how can they pass judgement on it?

I try to do just that I dont bash any distro that I havent tried yet. Among alot of my fellow admins though it seems distro's like gentoo's portage and debians apt-get are getting alot of fans recently.

It seems to me like it can be compared to the great linux - windows debate on zdnet.com's forums, people are either biased toward one paticular os or they feel threatened by something new.

[Suicidal]

regeya wrote:

Others say that Gentoo is praised by people who are unable to install Debian and have never been introduced to a good package format like RPM. Oh, and Gentoo users are snobby trash-talkers.

I hate to be the one to burst that guy's bubble but RPM is the whole reason that I went looking for another distro. First I tried red hat for about 6 months then mandrake for about 6 minutes.

Portage just makes more since than searching google for RPM's all night long, at least for me it does.

[Suicidal]

That is the way it is supposed to be. I cant talk my bosses into buying into linux if I am searching for an RPM that may or may not exist, furthermore when I install gentoo on a box that had windows or redhat on it they always comment on the performance increase.

I have cron jobs set to keep everything updated that run nightly. About once a week I ssh to them to see if anything needs to be done such as etc-update.

The fact that I can use the cron daemon and a few clever simple bash scripts to keep all of them running smooth is a testament to portage's design. (ty drobbins )

The only thing gentoo & portage really leave me wanting is a more stable enterprise tree of portage.

I guess we are 1337 because even when portage is broken (ie broken ebuild) it works better than most of the other technologies out there when they arent broken.

[F16PilotJumper]

I don't think so.. Every Gentoo user I've ever encountered has been extremely helpful.

We have a pretty large group of them on my college campus, and they do indeed help people with other OSes, other linux distros, etc. They even maintain a student-run lab of Gentoo boxes that anyone can come in and use to do work, etc. Every couple of months they have a basic linux workshop and help out anyone from campus and community who is interested in trying out linux - usually one of the easier to use distros for newbies, perhaps Gentoo for those who are more computer literate.

[Redeeman]

hehehahahahahah..... mwuahahahahah

(just to think about archlinux compete with gentoo on features)

[deepwave]

Elistist, eh? I thought using Linux was elist enough. No honestly, I think Gentoo is one of the nicest distros to use for the following reasons:

1.) Nicest user and developer community.
2.) Detailed instructions, that even a "newbie" can follow.
3.) No dependency hell.
4.) The hotest, bleeding edge programs out there.
5.) Forcing... (probabily too harsh of a word) you to learn and use one of the easiest UIs, the console. (strange isn't?)
6.) Teaching you how the Linux OS works even up to the minor details.
7.) Easy configuration using text files...

As for those who need, ease of install, they should try out Knoppix.

[aja]

A quick survey of the arch forums did pick up a fair bit of commentary about gentoo, a significant amount of which (but by no means all) was negative. But that is to be expected. For the most part, I thought the comments were reasonable, even if I disagreed. People who had difficulty with gentoo are permitted to report that - even if we think it was user error. We certainly don't muzzle people who come in here saying that they had problems with Red Hat (or Arch, for that matter).

While there were a few vituperative postings and gratuitous flames and trolls, you wouldn't have to search these forums for long to find similar comments about other distros from some of our less enlightened denizens. It is a common quality of new, small communities to adopt a persecution complex - it helps pull them together. We used to do the same thing with Debian. Now, we are establishment, and can afford to take the high road.

A distro is not a religion. Just because someone doesn't think gentoo is cool is not a reason to doubt their sanity or competence. Our best defence to such attacks, particularly in someone else's forums, is to ignore them and continue to be the helpful, pleasant community that proves them wrong.

[CrashPat]

Every Gentoo user I've ever met is an elitist jerk. Listen to my justification before jumping down my throat:

1.) I first learned about Gentoo from the LUG at my college. These guys had the gall to hold a meeting at 4pm on a wednesday and take about 2 hours to show some things about gentoo. I think there were 7 people in the audience.

2.) The step by step installation instructions are so poor that I could easily follow them and get everything installed first try. I only have one computer right now so I opened the gentoo homepage in a text browser.. links2 I think is included on the live-cd. If gentoo users were not so elite then they couldn't write instructions that any moron could follow. The installation should be more like Debian was when I first installed it. You sit at a command line and try to figure out what command to run. Or FreeBSD in its earlier days. UGH.

3.) Upon joining the forums any question I had was already answered in the archives. If somebody asks a dupe question they get reminded of the search feature and usually their question is answered. Any non-elitist group would not do that. Expect new users to use the SEARCH box? OMG.

4.) What the hell is arch linux anyway? Never heard of it till just now.

As you can see, gentoo is for the elitist in all of us.

[nrl]

newsflash a dead fish could install and run gentoo. there is nothing to really learn except a few more things on the commandline.

I don't get this, the fact that Gentoo is easy to install is a Good Thing it seems like (s)he's saying that if Gentoo was harder to install we would all be "l33t" but since it's easy we are just idiots? What should I do then search out the hardest to use, most obscure distro and use it for the sake of being "l33t"? Please I'd rather stick with my Gentoo .

And as for rpm rejects the only other OSs I have used for long periods of time other than Gentoo are Debian and FreeBSD.

[Suicidal]

I don't get this, the fact that Gentoo is easy to install is a Good Thing it seems like (s)he's saying that if Gentoo was harder to install we would all be "l33t" but since it's easy we are just idiots? What should I do then search out the hardest to use, most obscure distro and use it for the sake of being "l33t"? Please I'd rather stick with my Gentoo

I get so sick of that aditude in the Linux community. I would like to convert my business to gentoo someday but aditudes like that just put people off.

And when I look at linuxiso.org I dont see any one distribution that covers as many architectures as gentoo does. Arch linux is just another binary distro so, it is useless in my opinion.

[Wilhelm]

I was a linux noob and after painfull hours trying to get SuSE to do what i wanted it to do i put Windows on my server (yeah Ughhh!!) and thought Linux is for nerds only although i felt it was something i needed to learn. Then somebody showed me Gentoo and how easy it was. I read up about it and found out it was like THE MOST HARDCORE LINUX so i gave it a go purely for fun. And to my surprise it was so easy to set up AND i fully understood all aspects of my system since i set it up myself. The manual was so easy to follow i was like "Why can't other distros have a manual like this". Things about linux suddenly started making sense. No more do this do that and don't think actions or a 6000 package database infront of you nose saying "Select" (takes a day to walk through it).

Gentoo is imo the way Linux should be.

- Fast "Custom compilable".
- Easy to install, update and maintain.
- Install on a "Need To Use" basis for a system to your liking.
- Fantastic forum support.
- Fully documented.
- The choice of software.

Anybody saying that Gentoo is crap should jump off a buiding IMO. With the Gentoo install you can build your system as any distro you like. Ok you don't get the fancy 3D menuing install and it does look like it's hardcore but it's not.

And even the website of Gentoo makes you want to have it .

And about elitism, Gentoo is all about elitism ..... at a user friendly level. Why bother with all those other distributions when you can go hardcore with less effort.

From now on gentoo is the only distro for me and i currently have many systems getting gentoo fitted .

Thank you Gentoo people for this fantastic distro and keep up the good work.

[knefas]

etilist probabily yes, closed-mind .... I hope not!

[psofa]

yeah sure its way too easy!
spending days figuring dependancies, library paths etc or wondering who the f*ck told redhat to do this ..... is just what makes u a hardcore linux user! [sarcasm]

[davecs]

Did anyone see the film: "Life of Brian" (by Monty Python's Flying Circus).

It is based in Judea at the time of the birth of Christ, and little groups of Jewish revolutionnaries are fighting against the Roman occupation.

Brian joins one of these groups. At their meeting one of them calls "Who are We?" and the others reply "The Judean People's Front!" - "And who do we hate?" - "The People's Front of Judea!"

Brian points out that these groups are supposed to be fighting Roman occupation, not each other!

So Microshaft controls most of the market for desktops. Linux is still a minority sport. There are programs and even hardware that binds us to keeping a Windoze partition somewhere, all we need is to persuade companies to port their drivers and programs to Linux. But instead, users of different Linux distros slag each other off whilst ignoring the real enemy!

For the record, I could not install Debian! Before Gentoo I used Mandrake and would still recommend it to most users.

However, I would recomment ANY desktop linux above Windoze, unless it was so badly put together it would show us up.

Of course Mandrake is not as fast as Gentoo it is general purpose, but the rpm system has never let me down, all dependencies are catered for. Both Mandrake and Gentoo compile gnucash without a hitch (surely the biggest test of all). I cannot comment on the others because I have not tried them!

But surely what we should be advocating is LINUX. And which flavour should just suit the individual.

[nrl]

But surely what we should be advocating is LINUX. And which flavour should just suit the individual.

By your argument surely you should advocate open source software in general, why advocate Linux at the expense of *BSD etc.

[davecs]

Fair enough, but you are being picky.

My main point was and is that there are a load of different types of open-source OS which between them have a tiny share, and big monolithic M$ who have the big share. So why do we get embroiled in distro flame wars?

If I were still a Windoze user, I would look down on the rabble and get really smug!

Fact is that, thanks to GPL, all little improvements made by people working for all the distros get used by all the other distros. So if you have a USE flag dvdr, when you emerge K3B you get a customised version of cdrecord which also does dvdrs, written by someone at Mandrake.

And that's the point, all distros play a useful role, and have to accept that they have different suitabilities. Users should accept this and not slag each other off!

[cottonmouth]

This is perhaps the most important feature of gentoo: its people and not its code!

Wisdom!

[ebrostig]

Had some fun-time today

I headed over to the arch linux forums and read a bit.
Seems like they have an inferiority complex towards Gentoo or something. I was this close to posting in some of those threads, but I restrained myself and had some fun time reading rather.

I guess arch linux is da bomb! (at least in their eyes and Gentoo is the evil one, even more so than *gasp* MicroSoft!).

Anyhow, arch linux people, enjoy your distro and continue to bash Gentoo, it's good for us

Erik

[[herb]]

Had some fun-time today

I headed over to the arch linux forums and read a bit.
Seems like they have an inferiority complex towards Gentoo or something. I was this close to posting in some of those threads, but I restrained myself and had some fun time reading rather.

I guess arch linux is da bomb! (at least in their eyes and Gentoo is the evil one, even more so than *gasp* MicroSoft!).

Anyhow, arch linux people, enjoy your distro and continue to bash Gentoo, it's good for us

Erik

I visited their forums last week, and actually DID end up posting a few messages, in response to a slew of gentoo-flames posted by some Arch-zealot named Sarah (don't remember her exact s/n).

I urge everyone to go to their forums, and search for the keyword "gentoo". Youll be amazed by what you uncover, especially if you encounter this Sarah girls posts.

Ive oft wondered how so many people can act like that, and their brain doesnt seem to try and stop them at all. Boggles the noggin.

On a side note, I AM an elitist, but not because of Gentoo. I was far better than all of you people LONG before Gentoo Linux came around

[ebrostig]

Lol [herb] (love that nick for some reason )

sarah31 was her nick and boy was she annoying

Erik

[Promit]

Whatever elitism we (you?) have is easily dwarfed by the Debian crowd, so there

[psyqil]

gentoo has lots of developers and lots of developers that just work on docs. arch does not. in fact the current doc developer is less useful than herpes.

Yeah, seems fun! I just registered