switching to Gentoo

[Ben Ricker]

Derick Centeno wrote:

> Dear Norberto:

> Second, Gentoo is brand spanking new.  It doesn't even have the "tried
> and true" world wide following of Debian. 

Have you been on the x86 Gentoo list? One of the busiest lists I am on. 
it keeps up with MySQL and Tomcat.

And I started using Gentoo about 2 years ago. It is not "brand spanking 
new" in the world of Linux. Sure Debian has been around forever; even 
longer then Redhat, if I remember correctly.

I would also note that the notion of "new" does not make sense in the 
Linux world. After all, distros are COLLECTIONS of programs. Nothing 
more or nothing less. Sure, you can ride the bleeding edge with Gentoo. 
I lived in that workd for at least a year. But you don't have to.

Aditionally, Gentoo allows you to accept the bleeding edge for 
INDIVIDUAL applications! I was doing daily updates of Evolution  and 
Mozilla for a while. It is really fun to trigger an emerge of Evolution 
development before leaving work and then coming in the next morning to 
see what is broken (or fixed) next.

Yes, it takes a long time to compile. But I notes that my desktop ran 
much quciker (or so it seemed to me) when I tweaked my compile options.

> IF I were going to switch it
> might be to Debian.  Being on the leading and BLEEDING EDGE, however is
> not my idea of fun. 

Remember, you need not be bleeding edge. Gentoo is the most flexible 
Linux distro out there. Period. you can stay on the safe route fall you 
want. Maybe update things once a week to get security or bug fixes. But 
you do get the latest pkgs available.


> Debian and Gentoo would be fine if I was not intergrating my work with
> others or if I was a lone shark hacker.  I'm a programmer, Sys. Admin.,
> and other things -hacker-, perhaps as well, as one must be within Linux
> to tweak,the thing into doing what one wishes.  However, I stay within
> the rules of fair play, choose to cooperate with others and find
> sufficient individual expression within YDL, Thank you.

I was a sys admin and Web Security Administrator and Gentoo served me 
well. I appreciate your views, but I just wanted to note that I think 
some of your reasoning to not accurately reflect Gentoo as a project.

Off the soap box...

Ben Ricker