x86-64 box

Andrew Hammond ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org
Wed Jun 8 19:55:38 UTC 2005


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Stewart C. Russell wrote:
> Andrew Hammond wrote:
> 
>>Either way, you're better off ignoring the Gentoo kiddies.
> 
> care to justify that with something other than prejudice?

- - If you want stability, go with RHEL, SuSE or maybe debian stable.
- - If you want performance, go with LFS or Slack and prepare to spend a
couple of months tuning (assuming you have the necessary skills).
- - If you want a good desktop, fedora and ubuntu seem popular.
- - If you want rice, gentoo all the way. Comes with excellent
documentation on how to bolt a 3 foot wing on your Dad's old P3.

While it is theoretically possible to achieve better performance by
compiling your own binaries, the amount of skill require to actually do
so is substantial. Unless you're a professional systems / tools guru,
you don't have the skill to build better binaries than the package
maintainers for the major distros. Portage doesn't solve this problem.
If anything, it aggravates it by giving people the impression that they
have capabilities which they are actually lacking. Gentoo kiddies, don't
seem capable of understanding this.

Furthermore, for the vast majority of systems, the performance
difference between perfectly optimized binaries and generic debian
compiles will be un-noticable. However, I'm willing to bet large amounts
of cash that a gentoo binary compiled by some amature "for performance"
will never be more stable than the debian binary compiled by the package
maintainer. Non-trivial binaries require even more skill and experience
to build well. The idea of using a libc compiled by someone with less
experience than the most Junior sysadmin is somewhat disturbing. But
then I actually expect my computer to work. This is another thing that
just seems beyond the grasp of your average Gentoo kiddy.

Consider the growing trend for opensource developers to refuse to accept
bug reports from Gentoo users. It's got nothing to do with prejudice.
They simply don't want to waste their time dealing with spurious bug
reports.

- --
Andrew Hammond    416-673-4138    ahammond-swQf4SbcV9C7WVzo/KQ3Mw at public.gmane.org
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.
CB83 2838 4B67 D40F D086 3568 81FC E7E5 27AF 4A9A
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