why Gentoo sucks, and why it will ultimately die

Message

platojones · Post by **platojones** » Sun May 13, 2012 9:53 pm

This thread is a classic...it's become part of Gentoo over the years...the longer it goes, the more ironic it becomes.

bigbangnet · Post by **bigbangnet** » Fri May 18, 2012 2:36 pm

Shouldn't this thread be closed since this is a post that started years ago and since then lots of things changed ?

Post by **John R. Graham** » Fri May 18, 2012 2:37 pm

We wouldn't take such a decision without lots of discussion first.

- John

Fitzcarraldo · Post by **Fitzcarraldo** » Fri May 18, 2012 3:41 pm

Perhaps old threads like these should go into an Archive forum?

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Sat May 19, 2012 5:11 am

But then people would just start new topics to make fun of this one; as it is, it can happen right here.

Also, there is the occasional valid point.

Kollin · Post by **Kollin** » Sat May 19, 2012 5:29 am

"If it works, don't fix it!"

This thread is fine as it is

disi · Post by **disi** » Sat May 19, 2012 2:51 pm

Ctrl+Alt+Del wrote:We need a dedicated subforum for "Gentoo sucks/I am Leaving Gentoo" and last but not least "I am back" Threads.

this says it all...

likewhoa · Post by **likewhoa** » Sun May 20, 2012 2:57 pm

disi wrote:
Ctrl+Alt+Del wrote:We need a dedicated subforum for "Gentoo sucks/I am Leaving Gentoo" and last but not least "I am back" Threads.
this says it all...

do like

gentooP4 · Post by **gentooP4** » Tue May 22, 2012 7:36 pm

platojones wrote:This thread is a classic...it's become part of Gentoo over the years...the longer it goes, the more ironic it becomes.

Exactly! Leave it I say.

botdotcom · Post by **botdotcom** » Tue May 22, 2012 8:09 pm

dunno why many people like this troubled distro...

Post by **John R. Graham** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:21 pm

I would say that's partly an accurate assessment: you really don't.

- John

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Tue May 22, 2012 9:29 pm

How come I get the impression that john-doe and botdotcom are one and the same person?
Gerard.

fogpipe · Post by **fogpipe** » Sat May 26, 2012 3:48 pm

I agree with the OP. I have just reinstalled gentoo, the last time i used it was 2006 or so and i am struck by the increase in complexity with no additional benefit that i have yet encountered.
I did an install while booted to another linux distro and the install went ok. The hardware scanning seems to be interfering with detection of the root device on boot (i have installed other linuxes lately and have not had this problem, so it is gentoo specific) so i have to specify it, but thats a minor annoyance that i think i can fix later.

i installed vim and fluxbox and the xserver first and that allowed me to get into fluxbox with start x. Then i installed xdm, xdm had over 200 dependencies, but it worked. I installed kdm and it hasnt worked yet. The USE flag and emerge and dependency scheme are really baroque. I will probably stick with it a little longer, just for the sake of the good memories i have of gentoo, but it seems to me, that if there is a linux standard, gentoo has deviated, farther than any distro i have seen lately, from it.

BTW i am posting on firefox Xforwarded from another box, I have spent hours compiling stuff and wading through dependencies and its easier to use firefox this way than installing it.

2nd EDIT: I should i guess, say that at least right now, despite its drawbacks, it still seems worth the effort, just not by the same margin that it used to.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Sat May 26, 2012 11:21 pm

fogpipe wrote:but it seems to me, that if there is a linux standard, gentoo has deviated, farther than any distro i have seen lately, from it.

What standards does gentoo not follow?

Regarding FHS for example we have some really serious people scanning the tree for files in bad locations etc. I don't think people do that on other distros. It works, leave it. Why care about standards.

And do you have a figure how often we fix Makefiles, cmake buildsystem, autotools build systems, SCons build systems etc pp because they do NOT follow those and other standards? I doubt that people/maintainers from binary distros care that much about those things (although I have had some positive experience with debian maintainers), because they compile it once and don't have to care about 10+ cases where this could break during build-time, cause random flags are set, LDFLAGs are ignored or lib suffix is not supported... games not supporting a seperate location for data files, Makefiles not respecting DESTDIR variable, overwriting CC, scripts touching the live-system during build time, compilation broken for "--as-needed" ldflags which is a sign for something funky and like 20+ things more that come to my mind.

So, what standards are you talking about?

fogpipe · Post by **fogpipe** » Sun May 27, 2012 1:41 am

hasufell wrote:
fogpipe wrote:
So, what standards are you talking about?
How about standards like "it works" because i have yet to try anything on the recent incarnation of gentoo that worked the first time i tried it. The install cd didnt recognize my drive, i installed it from another linuix, The default kernel couldnt detect its root device, so i installed a kernel from kernel.org (which worked fine with no initrd and detected the root device no problem).
I did an "emerge gnome-base/gnome" and got nearly 200 depenencies of gnome 2.3, when i was expecting 3 and its a version of 2.3 that doesnt work. Every time i try to add an applet to the panel it just kills and restarts it.
The last time i used gentoo ended in about 2005 or six and as i use the new version i am recalling that towards the end i had quit updating the install because it was just getting unmaintainable.
I dont mind putting a little work into a linux install, but this is ridiculous.

You know, i take that back, the one thing that did work the first time i tried it was installing gnome-mplayer so i could watch a movie while i tinkered.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Sun May 27, 2012 1:52 am

fogpipe wrote:How about standards like "it works"

Your difficulties with gentoo have nothing to do with "linux standards".

You may want to join #gentoo on freenode, post on the user ML or open new threads here about your specific issues. People are likely to help.

likewhoa · Post by **likewhoa** » Sun May 27, 2012 3:03 am

Gentoo is only as good as the user installing, configuring, customizing, tweaking and troubleshooting it.

fogpipe · Post by **fogpipe** » Sun May 27, 2012 3:21 am

likewhoa wrote:Gentoo is only as good as the user installing, configuring, customizing, tweaking and troubleshooting it.

I guess it depends on how much time the user has to waste, especially when things like the default kernel dont work. Blame the user is always the last resort of bad software. I have done it myself in defense of monstrosities i helped develop

gerard27 · Post by **gerard27** » Sun May 27, 2012 12:27 pm

@ fogpipe,

Then i installed xdm, xdm had over 200 dependencies, but it worked.

This shows that you didn't install correctly.
The "xdm" you need is part of xorg-server!
I have been using Gentoo as my only OS for more than 8 years,but of course I'm a fool.
And judging by the number of posters here there are many more,all stupid people not using point & click to install.
Gerard.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Sun May 27, 2012 12:30 pm

fogpipe wrote:
likewhoa wrote:Gentoo is only as good as the user installing, configuring, customizing, tweaking and troubleshooting it.
Blame the user is always the last resort of bad software.

That is why WE don't just blame the user, but have many ways to provide help for users.

as for the "not enough time" argument I gotta say:
a) I don't care how much time you got.
b) I disagree. If you compare abilities of gentoo with other distros and imagine how much work it would take to completely redesign your environment, your toolchain, yout python setup etc pp you will end up with a complete reinstall + days of fixing things and looking for ways to overcome the inability to customize all these.

If you are not familiar with the mechanisms of gentoo look at the documentation, at the handbook, at the devmanual, at the mailing lists, ask on freenode.
If you don't have time for that, then why do you rant in the gentoo forum instead of fixing your box?

And if you don't, I might blame you too.

fogpipe · Post by **fogpipe** » Mon May 28, 2012 12:26 am

You know, i think i have had enough of gentoo. Losing the ability to playback video in the middle of installing kde-meta was the last straw for me. I beleive it may have been changes that the polkit-kde made to dbus config, at least thats as far as i got in solving it. No doubt a problem caused by my mis-navigating the wilderness of USE flags. But i just dont have the tolerance for trivial complexity that it takes to pursue this any further, especially not when there is a working linux distro on another partition of my hard drive.

hasufell · Post by **hasufell** » Mon May 28, 2012 12:43 am

Then use the KDE desktop profile instead of fine-graining your useflags.

Code: Select all

eselect profile list

Catanduva · Post by **Catanduva** » Tue May 29, 2012 10:43 am

I don't understand at all. People start using gentoo thinking it's like some kind of underground Ubuntu.
These guys should know since the installation proccess that Gentoo is another thing. It's not another "bundle of eye candy user friendly packages" distro. It is the way it is. Learn everything and build from there.

I use Gentoo for more than five years and changed my computer some times. Every single reinstalation went smooth if i follow the handbook. Then comes the configuration of every package, use flags and all that thing.
I work and go to college and even if i don't have the time to do a fresh install through the week (it's cool because you can split the process in days if you want), i will do it on weekends and go through everything again if necessary.
In fact i will do it this week because i don't need windows anymore to play my guitar, since i bought an amp. So i'll mess around with all my partitions and i found simplier to do a fresh install.

Maybe i'm a masochist, but i liked every fresh install i made. I fine tune it more and more as i get more experience and my system occupies less space and resources.
You don't like Gentoo and have a hard time, it's ok. But don't call it names because you can't get it to work. Everytime something didn't work and i already tried anything i come here, expose my problem and every single time people helped me and i got it done.
These days it's rare to find a problem. I was having a hard time configuring my router because i never had one, but it was the router internal configuration, not gentoo. I just get dhcp running and everything went just fine.
I tried some other "bleeding edges" distros that do things faster, but i don't like the lack of control of my dependencies.
Arch, for example, is a good distro, but you try to emerge some packages and they bring all the Gnome stuff just to lay a single icon on your screen. And i hate icons.

I never cared about who maintains Gentoo. It's rare that i come to this forum and if gentoo is dying i am not noticing it. Maybe i'll only notice when emerge stops upgrading things and i am kept alone in the desert.

Of course i have some complains. I find emerge --pretend to be slow, but i can live with that, it's a lot of packages and details for it to gather. So it's ok.
And since i hate firefox/chrome/opera and those shi**y browsers i use dwb, jumanji, surf and similars. But they crash a lot because they're all a little unstable at Gentoo (and they are all masked) in comparison of other distros, but i can live with that too.

Ok, i'm bored at work.

slonocode · Post by **slonocode** » Tue May 29, 2012 11:34 pm

Catanduva wrote:I don't understand at all. People start using gentoo thinking it's like some kind of underground Ubuntu.

Maybe you don't understand at all because it's false that people start using gentoo thinking it's like some kind of underground Ubuntu. fogpipe clearly stated that he used gentoo in 2006 so he knows what gentoo is. He clearly noticed the difference in experience from then to now.

Catanduva · Post by **Catanduva** » Wed May 30, 2012 1:51 am

He is clearly saying that he doesn't want to waste time and want things working for every situation by default. This is what i'm talking about.
You'll have to waste time in certain things and learn to make it work for you. If you don't want to waste time, then you're in the wrong place.
I'm using gentoo for five or more years and i don't see any increase in difficult. And i did severals fresh installs in new computers and configuring the network and internet is getting easier and easier than when i tried the first times.