Gentoo desktop?

[Anthony de Boer]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 11, 2008 at 09:07:04PM -0500, Anthony de Boer wrote:
> >  ...
> > I was talking to one of the key Debian people awhile ago, and he said
> > that the percentage of source downloads relative to binary downloads
> > on the Debian FTP mirrors is rather small.  People are happy with it,
> > but they're not looking under the sheets.
> 
> Which is a good thing.  Most people should just be happy using things.
> The world is much more efficient when people specialize and do things
> they are good at.  If everyone has to repeat all work, then very little
> new and productive would ever get done.
> 
> This is why to me the concept of gentoo is offensive. :)

There are a lot of different Linux distros, then there are the BSDs and
Solaris, etc, and I'm old enough to remember the legendary UNIX which
begat them.  The choices we have today are each optimized toward a
particular use.  If I were you, I'd probably be using Debian too, but for
the purpose of being able to "look under the sheets" and see source code
and the build process and how the whole system hangs together, and being
able to tweak it as I see fit, Gentoo is meeting that need quite well. 
Note that I'm not insisting on it being the right choice in all
circumstances.  I've used a bunch of the others, trying out ZFS in the
upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release is looking intriguing, and over the years
some things die and others arise (there's an internal tempest threatening
Gentoo at the moment, which I hope they resolve; I was using something
else before it and may eventually find myself using something else after
it).  And sometimes you'd want to pick a best-common-denominator
OS/distro to use for everything, rather than tracking how things work in
a bunch of them.  And an employer's distro of choice does mean
specializing in that one for them too.

> I am sure I could think of something to call you, but I am not sure
> what.  Insisting on compiling things yourself does not make you a
> programmer.  Paranoid is more likely.

One of the early firewall publications (the FWTK manual, if I recall)
had a cartoon of a worried-looking sysadmin with the caption "I'm
paranoid.  But am I paranoid _enough_?"  That's the sort of work I've
done over the past number of years, with firewalling and host security
and application robustness and storage redundancy/backups.  (Is anyone
hiring?!?)

-- 
Anthony de Boer
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists