why Gentoo sucks, and why it will ultimately die

[Voltago]

When Daniel Robbins leaded Gentoo, everything worked, there wasn't so many problems with the portage.

Also the sun was brighter, the grass was greener, men were still men, there ised^H^H^H^H were no irregular verbs, and my socks didn't smell that bad.

[timeBandit]

When Daniel Robbins leaded Gentoo, everything worked, there wasn't so many problems with the portage.

Also the sun was brighter, the grass was greener, men were still men, there ised^H^H^H^H were no irregular verbs, and my socks didn't smell that bad.

[d2_racing]

Yeah...

[Mike Hunt]

OpticalDezires,

Have you seen this? It works...

[d2_racing]

And it's working pretty good too.

[Ormaaj]

Though Gentoo itself may die, the idea behind it will certainly not. Gentoo will not die until there is some other source-based distro to supersede it.

Any distro is just the sum of its parts, and the vast majority of those parts are not specific to a distro. So, when we're talking about Gentoo we're really talking about portage and its associated system administration tools. I think those tools satisfy a need which will not go away anytime soon. There is plenty of room for improvement within Gentoo, but the premise behind Gentoo is what keeps it going. I wouldn't use any other OS at the moment.

[desultory]

Split off "[topic=788199]and... hu.... ah....no.......nothing[/topic]" and moved the rest from Off the Wall back to Gentoo Chat.

[AutoBot]

Having spent over 2 hours reading the entire thread I can only sigh. I was excited at the thought of returning to gentoo after a long hiatus to find drobbins, seemant, and a whole host of key individuals gone on to other things. It seems things have declined to a point where us old school guys find that perhaps gentoo is no longer what it was originally intended to be. Simple, fun, configurable, robust and the most important thing....an easy to maintain ports based distribution. With that said, I still find portage to be a great package manager and will one day perhaps return to the thing I once loved......ebuilding. Do you guys find that portage itself is more commonly the issue or the ebuilders (package maintainers) themselves in todays gentoo? I don't know who suggested doing more on the server-side but I agree that it would alleviate some of portages slowness, offsetting much of the work over to the "cloud" seems the way to go these days. To the OP, hope you found what you were looking for but I have to disagree with you in that gentoo sucks. Still configurable...check, still robust...check, still simple to maintain...maybe?, still fun? Well maybe it was only ever fun to geeks like us.

[wcg]

Seems to work. A couple of hours to get from "stable, no X" to
"with X, xfce4, and firefox", all configured, that is actually fast
compared to past experience with other distributions (~amd64 no multilib).

It took longer to get sound working (anything that needs gstreamer
as a backend seems to have problems at the moment;
<code>USE="png" emerge -DuN mplayer smplayer</code>
solved it (USE=alsa, Realtek ALC883 soundchip on the mb).

The last really annoying thing that I can remember was when an upgrade
to coreutils broke DIR_COLORS. I backed off to the previously installed
coreutils version, waited a few weeks, and the next coreutils -r? version
fixed it. That tells me that 1) there are a lot of users, and 2) the
package maintainers for critical packages take the job seriously.

Note: Should lynx-help really be halfway around the planet by default?
(make install-help)

edit: Actually I did find lynx-help in /usr/share/doc/lynx-[version]. It simply did
not look as if "make install-help" had run, reading the end of the ebuild log.
/etc/lynx.cfg has the correct path to it.

[Yamakuzure]

Ah. Out of the window with my "Buried-for-good"-hopes on this thread.

[oleglelchuk]

There is nothing wrong with gentoo. If you want a package installed, all you have to do is to type emerge <package>. However, on FreeBSD, it's not so easy. You have to go to a specific directory if you want to compile a specific package from ports. But gentoo allows typing emerge from any directory; all you have to do is to login as a super user or root. So, gentoo wins.

[CeleryStrings]

-

[scotus africanus]

this thread is big on emotion and thin on fact and evidence
i have used gentoo for many years, have noticed a few things
- installation has definitely become a lot easier, no longer a baptism by fire for newbies which in some ways is a shame because it was a very good way of learning about the nuts and bolts of linux
- if my system breaks most of the time i can find a solution, and usually i am at fault for not having read documentation, forums etc
- one of my biggest frustrations is documentation, especially on current important issues . the information is always there but difficult to find . Problems with java, python updates, libpng come to mind, it is only after one is stuck half way through an update that the frantic googling begins, even then there is a solution almost all of the time
- there is a fine line between bleeding edge and broken, personally i shy away from there which is probably why my systems are generally stable
i am guilty as many people are of not contributing enough to the community, that in my opinion is the only way gentoo will grow .
I am grateful for all the hard work that goes into the distro + am proud to use gentoo
if gentoo is in danger of dying it is because too many of us are quiet bystanders, not because there are fundamental + terminal problems with the distro per se
s.a.

[oleglelchuk]

There is nothing wrong with gentoo. If you want a package installed, all you have to do is to type emerge <package>. However, on FreeBSD, it's not so easy. You have to go to a specific directory if you want to compile a specific package from ports. But gentoo allows typing emerge from any directory; all you have to do is to login as a super user or root. So, gentoo wins.

Besides being an incredibly stupid line of logic for choosing an OS, it's wrong. Check out portmaster or portupgrade.

I only used FreeBSD for a brief period of time; that's why I don't know about many utilities it can offer.

[John R. Graham]

Ah. Out of the window with my "Buried-for-good"-hopes on this thread.

But it's such a useful place to merge other examples of the genre.

- John

[Yamakuzure]

Ah. Out of the window with my "Buried-for-good"-hopes on this thread.

But it's such a useful place to merge other examples of the genre.

- John

Oh, now that's a really good point you have there.

[Naib]

Why Necro's suck and will never die...

[luismw]

Hi, I must confess that all these whining threads about the slow and inevitable death of Gentoo almost turned off my excitement about trying Gentoo out back in January. I did install Gentoo anyway and I haven't looked back ever since.

Installation is quite simple if you follow the manual, I had to ask for help just once and it turned out that the problem was that I hadn't read the manual thoroughly.

For me, the main advantage of Gentoo is that, having a quite limited PC, I was able to get running many programs that wouldn't work with other distros. I was using Ubuntu before Gentoo. Try convincing Ubuntu not to use pulseaudio and you'll see how its so-called "user-friendliness" is not really there. When you try to look for help you find out that Ubuntu's forums are made of a bunch of clueless users, like myself, that are unable to provide any advice. With Gentoo, you just edit your USE flags.

And regarding the slow stabilization of packages, at least in my case, everything is quite up to date and it's really simple to unmask a package or add an overlay for the few things where you really need the bleeding edge.

So, I'm very happy with Gentoo, but I'll admit that it's not for everyone. There's a vast majority of people that doesn't want to see a shell, or read a manual, or spend a bit of time on maintenance of their OS, or sit through a compilation. And that's the kind of people that binary distros or proprietary OS are for.

[oleglelchuk]

The amazing thing about gentoo is that you only need to type one command (emerge --sync) to make your system fully aware of all the latest packages, including those packages that are hard masked and soft masked. Then you can simply upgrade! But Debian is different. Debian makes the process of upgrading to the latest packages more difficult.

[AwoL]

I still get a kick out of people who talk about all of the problems they have had with Gentoo (and therefore Gentoo must be garbage because they can't not break their box), whereas all of my Gentoo builds for the last several years have been running SMOOTH. In fact, my Gentoo machines give me far fewer headaches than the handful of servers running binary distros that I admin. Pebkac anyone?

[Muso]

I still get a kick out of people who talk about all of the problems they have had with Gentoo (and therefore Gentoo must be garbage because they can't not break their box), whereas all of my Gentoo builds for the last several years have been running SMOOTH. In fact, my Gentoo machines give me far fewer headaches than the handful of servers running binary distros that I admin. Pebkac anyone?

While Gentoo can have the odd issue (like all distros/operating systems), the most common problems people face is PEBKAC, and the only solution for that problem is knowledge.

[jserink]

These prophecies of doom for gentoo are no different than the enviro-apocalyptic non-sense in the press.

There is nothing wrong with Gentoo, its all a matter of comparison. These statements that Gentoo will die are based on what, problems updating Qt last time around? Get over it. Gentoo is a geek-control-freek distro used by people who want full control over their machine(s) and the SW that runs on it(them). If you want to run SW compiled by someone else, by all means choose the offering from that outfit in Redmond Washington. If you want control you use Gentoo....but control has a price, you have to be willing to learn which is exactly why I use Gentoo.

I used SUSE before and i wasn't learning Linux, I was learning Yast. Not interested in what Yast does, don't care. Similarly with Yum, and all the other stuff out there.

If you think everything works fine, perfect, at Ubuntu, go over to their forums and read, you'll notice a few things:
1. Many, many problems,
2. Not nearly the level of technical sophistication in the users that post solutions if anyone posts solutions.

The gentoo forums are fantastic.

Gentoo will not die till something just like it comes to replace it.

:)
Peace.

[Mgiese]

still alive

[botdotcom]

We need a dedicated subforum for "Gentoo sucks/I am Leaving Gentoo".

dude...agree!

[skellr]

zombie threads never die.