Any Gentoo Users on this list?

Thu Feb 19 20:27:27 UTC 2009

Hi,

I would happily help you install it. I've done it at least 5 times..  
probably around 10.

However, I would like to know why you're considering Gentoo. Based on  
my experience, I would personally recommend against Gentoo in most  
cases. Gentoo was among my list of distros that I kept going back and  
forth between but now it's no longer in my good books.. last time I  
installed it I felt like Gentoo had gone downhill for good. I'm  
replying to the list in the hopes that if some of my dated knowledge  
is in need of correction. I mostly used it as a Desktop not as a server.

I don't want to start a flame war or anything, but I'll list why I  
think so in the form of bullet points with a summary paragraph at the  
end.

- USE Flags

As Colin mentioned maybe the biggest pro for Gentoo is the USE flags  
which I have yet to see on another of the major Linux distros. Like  
many things in Gentoo this seems to be a pro at first (wow, hey, I can  
customize my Linux installation!) and it does its job mostly well. So  
if that's what you want then great. If you don't want any KDE apps or  
all the libs you can prevent them from being installed and any other  
packages that use them optionally can turn off support for them. Let  
me not undermine the versatility of these flags; you can override them  
on a per-install basis. So if you want some apps to have X capability  
built-in and some not then you have a default USE flag which you  
override whenever you need X.

Several months down the road you hear about this cool new KDE app, in  
my case it was some Movie editing software-- name is escaping me--  
that Marcel Gagne wrote about in a Linux Journal article. Guess what?  
I had to wait overnight for it to install because I'd disabled KDE  
apps and libs up to that point so I had to build something like 50-100  
of them.

Now I have KDE installed but none of my previous apps built with  
support for KDE. So I have to rebuild them all with KDE support, which  
I can do nicely with emerge on a good day, but it will still take  
forever.

- Blocking packages, blocking updates, custom versions

Another cool feature of Gentoo is that you can block unwanted packages  
quite well.. you can even do it by specific version numbers. So if you  
do an update but you don't want your Java version to be touched then  
you can add a rule that blocks Java from being updated. You can even  
block packages altogether, and you can install specific versions too.

- Bootstrapped Linux

One of the coolest things about Gentoo was their idea of stages. You  
had three installation stages, stage1, stage2, and stage3 install. The  
first stage was the bare bones of the system such as coreutils and  
gcc. Stage2 was more of the core, and stage3 was the rest. The great  
thing was that you could choose to build every one of these stages or  
download pre-built binaries. Doing a stage1 installation meant that  
all your coreutils, gcc, everything you'd need to compile the kernel  
would have your CPU's optimizations, and then you'd proceed to build  
everything in stage2 using your optimized stage1 binaries, etc. If you  
were short on time you could download pre-built stages and start  
building from a further point.

They dropped support for stage1 and stage2 installations last time I  
tried (on x86 and/or amd64 -- very common arch!). So the coolest part  
of Gentoo was just thrown away.

- Package system (emerge vs. apt and yum)

emerge downloads a source which is then built rather than downloading  
binaries. This, in theory, is one of the coolest things about the  
distro because it allows you to do customizing via the USE flags *and*  
allows you to compile the source with optimization flags according to  
your architecture. In other distros you're download pre-built binaries  
meant to work on all versions of your architecture, so ie. x86 may not  
have anything more than 386 CPU ptimizations in it (so packages are  
build for many archs, like the kernel, but most not). So at first this  
make you think that everything will run faster, but studies show that  
there's hardly a difference if at all. In fact Debian often beats  
Gentoo in the performance tests.

The biggest problem I had with emerge is I found a lack of maintenance  
for packages. This one package didn't install because one of the  
source files was missing a newline character at the end of it (or  
something as trivial) and my gcc version marked that as an error  
rather than a warning. bugs.gentoo.org had a bug fix that was dated to  
several months before. It boggled my mind that such a simple patch had  
not been submitted to fix the build script in that amount of time.  
This is only one such story, but in general emerge failed more often  
than both apt and yum in my experience. Most of the time it's a quick  
fix, but it does get annoying.

One plus of portage/emerge is that you can mix and match stable and  
unstable packages by overriding a flag when using emerge. Again this  
is customizable on a per-package and version range basis.

Last time I checked (over a year ago) most amd64 packages were still  
in "unstable". Most distros had the same packages in stable by now.  
I'm not talking about rare unheard-of packages, I'm talking about  
mostly common ones. That was the last straw for me because it just  
seemed to me that Gentoo was getting nowhere by then. This was  
slightly after their main president/leader had left. Sorry I don't  
remember his or her name.

So in summary Gentoo seems like it might be a fun toy. If  
customization is important to you then Gentoo will be a good distro as  
long as you're patient enough to wait for emerge to build packages  
(updating your packages is usually an overnight thing too). But  
nowadays I'm getting the impression that Arch is the better way to go  
if you want something custom (though I've never tried it so don't hold  
me to that!). A lot of the cool things that spark your inner geek  
actually aren't as cool/good as you'd expect and that's only if it's  
still support for it. Package maintenance is good, but not as good as  
other major Linux distros.

Marc
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