Linux drove me to get a Mac

[Ian Petersen]

On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Tyler Aviss <tjaviss-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Anyone on the list use Gentoo? I've always wanted to try that out so
> maybe I'll have more luck, though in many cases it'll likely be
> trading one type of frustration for another, at least I've got a fast
> machine to compile on now :-)

I use Gentoo and I think you're right that you'd be trading in
frustrations.  I really like Gentoo's package manager but the limited
experience I've had with Debian (it might have been a Debian
derivative) is that apt is at least as good, with the added benefit of
installing precompiled binaries so Apache takes seconds to install
instead of tens of minutes, and OO.o _also_ takes seconds to install
(post-download) instead of hours.

I'm still running Gentoo mostly out of convenience--I think it would
be inconvenient to migrate to a new distribution when the one I'm
running basically works.  I only have one machine at home and it's
loaded up with gigabytes of personal data--things like wedding and
honeymoon pictures, financial records, and the source code to the
real-time OS I built in university that I'd love to play with again
"one day".  I'm sure it's possible to migrate my system "in place",
but I get discouraged into inaction every time I consider how much
planning and backing up I'd need to do to make sure I don't lose
anything and then consider the fact that the system works as-is.

I think Gentoo is based on a neat idea but it's not executed as well
as it might be.  Portage (the package manager and its associated
repository of packages) occasionally breaks in mysterious ways.  It
gives you the flexibility to build a mostly-custom distribution
without the hassle of Linux-from-Scratch, but that flexibility comes
with an associated cost: chances are close to zero that anyone else
has the same configuration.  The community is generally pretty good,
so it's often possible to find solutions on the Gentoo forums, but the
quality has declined since I first started using Gentoo in ~2002, so I
don't recommend the forums as heartily as a I used to.  Also, the dev
community seems to be hit-and-miss.  Many packages are pretty well
maintained, but others not so much, and the "others" are not always
obscure packages.

Running Gentoo taught me more about managing a Linux-based PC than any
other single factor, so by no means do I regret choosing it.  My
interest in tinkering has waned considerably since I graduated
university, got married, and started a real career.  My next fresh
install of Linux will probably be Debian, or maybe one of its
derivatives.  I'd like to leverage other people's compile farms, and a
dev team with a real dedication to quality control.  I think Gentoo is
best suited to applications like scientific compute farms where you
can create your own dedicated compile farm that pushes binaries to the
rest of the network and where the ability to turn compile flags on and
off on a package-by-package basis is worth the effort.  Burning cycles
on compiling doesn't make any sense to me anymore (it always seemed
dubious, but I've finally chosen a side of the fence).  I still like
the ideas behind Portage but, as I said, apt is pretty damn good, too,
and Portage seems to suffer from some implementation flaws that limit
its ability to meet its potential.

Ian
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