So Long, and Thanks for All the ebuilds.
Last night I replaced Gentoo on my desktop with Ubuntu Hoary. This is something I should have done a *long* time ago. Everything .. just works. I still can’t get over how fast apt is. I’ve been compiling everything for way too long.
I was thinking back about why I started using Gentoo. Before Gentoo I was using Red Hat (7.0-9.0) which gave me a very bad attidude twords a binary package manaegment system. There would never be a package for what I wanted, or the package would be built for some slightly different system that would refuse to install… it was just a mess. Nothing ever worked right, I would always managed to break the system pretty good after using it for a fairly short period of time.
Then a friend recomended Gentoo, which promised to do away with dependency hell because everything was compiled from source for your system. This sounded great, and I have to admit, worked great. I had never had a system that worked so flawlessly. I learned quite a bit from the install (how to use and configure grub, how the filesystem is layed out, etc.).
After time though I started to experience problems. First, it quickly became very irritating to have to wait for every package to compile from source, as well as for rsync to go through the several thousand files when updating the portage tree. I also begain to notice things start to break, and found myself spending way too much time trying to fix very obscure problems. When I first used Gentoo I thought that it was basically linux from scratch with a frontend to make things easier. I had *no* idea that it used a completly non standard init system or half of the packages would have five or more gentoo-specific patches applied to them. I thought I would be getting every piece of software exactly how the author intended, but ended up with a set of packages that could become so broken not even the original developers wanted to deal with them.
I didn’t use Gentoo because I thought it was better than Debian, I really never knew about Debian. I have no idea how that happened, but I guess after I found Gentoo I was happy and stopped looking for something else.
One thing that I do think that Gentoo does much better than Ubuntu, but especially much better than Debian is their documentation. The Gentoo website has a great set of easy to read and understand documentation that explains how to set up lots of common software such as Apache. The debian website is extremely unattractive and difficult to navigate, and while the Ubuntu website doesn’t look too bad (although it is brown), it is quite difficult to navigate too. Gentoo also ships with some nice looking shell prompts and pretty colors during the bootup sequence which gives a nice modern “feel” to the distro, something that both ubuntu and debian lack, and although some may say that this really doesn’t matter, I think that inexperienced users apprecieate it a lot.
So there’s my story. If anyone reading this still uses Gentoo please leave a comment explaining why. I’m not trying to start a war, just curious.
Categorized as Open Source, Technology, Open Source/Ubuntu
I did a switch from Gentoo to Hoary in January and and i’m very happy after that. The main reason - it was taking too long to get everything running and I just didn’t have the time.
I switched from Redhat to Gentoo and I’m using Gentoo ever since. Not only that I don’t have problems finding packages, I also have great performance and the most important thing : USE flags.
I went SLS -> Slackware -> RedHat -> Debian / installing Mandrake on noobs machines -> Gentoo -> Ubuntu.
I switched from Debian to Gentoo because everything was so out of date : at that point, even in sid. It was incredible, you needed 20 or more apt-sources to keep up to date.
USE flags are in general a horrible crutch for projects that do not know how to modularise thier code ( eg, “lets make MySQL support a compile time option rather than a DSO. Then we can use moronic ifdefs everywhere!”). Those uses should lead to packages for each DSO. Certain debian maintainers ( hello, whoever maintains dovecot) don’t get this either, and just make the main package depend on every possible option, with no subpackages.
All legitimate uses of USE flags should lead to multiple packages implementing one virtual package. Eg eclipse compiled for gcj or eclipse compiled for a normal jvm. eclipse-gcj and eclipse-jvm both provide eclipse.
In the end I got sick of Gentoo breaking horribly, and having a queue of 250 packages needing compilation.
Before Gentoo, I had fun with Slackware, Suse, RedHat. Once I installed Gentoo, I found myself with a system that “just works”, and at my taste. I really can do what I want with it.
I installed my system 2 years ago and never had any “major” problems.
The 3 downsides of Gentoo are :
1. The compilation time. I solve this one by emerging all the packages I want at night, when I go to sleep.
2. The problems some packages cause (specially some libs). Some times you must re-install some packages, once you update a library. And that usually means more compilation time. But there is the revdep-rebuild command that takes care of that by itself :-)
3. The “too easy to update” thing. Some times you don’t take a look at what packages are being emerged in a “world update”, and you end upgrading a package with a new version for which the config files have changed, or some features are not the same. Usually that means either reinstalling the old version of the package, or reading the doc and upgrading the new package config.
I like to compare Gentoo to a F1 race car. You can make it give the most of it, but you need to tweak it a lot.
I think Gentoo is a distribution aimed at power users and at users that *want* to learn and master Linux. Anyone with some will can make it work just fine, but it may take some time.
Ubuntu is what Linux needs to attract “the masses”. I tried it, and I installed it in my girlfriends computer. As you said. It just works. I think it is *the good* distribution for starting using Linux, and I hope it will continue that way…
But it’s downsides are that you cannot do what you really want with it as easilly as you can with Gentoo.
And as you said, Gentoo has the best documentation and support I ever saw in a Linux distribution, in their site and in their user forums.
Ubuntu is a “young” distribution, but it’s community is creating itself really quickly, so the support will probably follow.
Well, enough said I think :-)
I’m using gentoo on both my desktop and laptop. In the case of my laptop I’m very pleased with Gentoo because it lets me have a very fine grained system, that only has what I want/need. Disk space is something I don’t have on my laptop, so that is pretty important for me. My desktop stays Gentoo mainly because my laptop is, and I like a consistant environment.
I think my biggest complaint comes in the form of a bug I submitted almost a year ago. It’s for a patch to be applied to the longrun utility for transmeta processors. I don’t think the guy who has been assigned to the bug cares. All the other bugs I’ve filed have been delt with quickly, but not that one.
I’ve thought about changing to get faster upgrades, but there is always some package not avalible for the distro yet, and I’d like to avoid the massive apt sources list. That’s my two-bits.
I use gentoo on my laptop and my personal servers. I’m quite pleased with the package management, the community, and the fact that when you emerge something, it’s dependencies are installed. If you change the use flags, dependencies change to fit the install.
I think what #4 captured why a lot of people, myself included, stick with gentoo. It was my first distro when I installed it on an old computer I received from a friend, just to try out linux. Three years later it’s still kicking and still fun — and I learn new things about it every day, which is another reason I like gentoo. It seems to facilitate learning a bit better than other distros that wrap your configuration into wizards and guis that may not have every option that each instance needs.
I’m currently running Gentoo and I’m planning to switch, too. I already had a parallel install of Ubuntu on this box, but I kicked it after some time.
What I don’t like about Gentoo is in general the time you spend for system management, ie configuring/fixing stuff you don’t care about. There is no problem with having to configure Apache if you are a webdeveloper or configuring X if you want a very special setup, but with Gentoo you actually have to configure all this stuff, no matter whether you’re interested or not.
Also a word about USE flags. Lots of people seem to love this, but I actually think it’s kind of strange. E.g. imagine you have the use flag +java set. Now if you compile gcc (which I’d actually prefer not do to anyways) its being compiled with gcj support. Which is IMHO completly unreasonable, the percentage of Java programmers/users using gcj is probably below 5%.
My point is that the global configuration +xyz has the wanted effect in some packages, but has completly ill effects in others. Like +perl breakes VIM in some combination with multithreaded perl, something I’d rather not even know about than having to fix myself.
The only thing I’m worrying about is package availability on Hoary, something that is really good on gentoo. Last time I tried this was why I dropped it again. To get things like C# desktop goodies (Tomboy etc.) I first started to add lots of different sources to apt which then broke everything in the system because they depended on non-Ubuntu packets (e.g. xorg vs xorg-ubuntu…).
But I’ll try again in some weeks.
I have been using Gentoo for a couple of years now both on my Laptop and Desktop (coming from a Redhat background with a very short dabble in Mandrake). While I also sometimes get frustrated waiting for packages to compile and messing with configuration files, I find that on the whole Gentoo allows me the flexability to have my system the way I want it.
Eric, you mention a non-standard init system, but surely using rc-update is preferable to messing with obtuse file names in your rc.d directory to get things starting up in the right order?
Also, something no one else has mentioned yet is that there are binary installs available for most of the common packages if you can’t be bothered waiting for the compilation.
Cheers,
James
Gentoo is nice when experimenting on system engineering. For example I like it for a mailgateway because its flexibity. I’ve been reading about http://componentizedlinux.org/ but I had no time to test it yet. I have the impression that it might allow simular things although missing the USE system.
Gentoo is hell when you like to use a Gnome/Mono desktop. Can anyone explain why this is ? Why is this working so badly ?
I moved from Ubuntu Hoary (pre-release) to Gentoo. I found that after big X/Gnome updates Hoary would really slow down. I like USE flags and the level of control it gives you. I don’t mind compiling…I just do it when I go to bed.
I had Gentoo installed on my laptop and I think I learned more about Linux in two weeks of running Gentoo than I had in the previous 18 months running Red Hat/Fedora on my desktop, I’d never compiled a kernel before for instance. However I did replace it with Ubuntu because eventually my system became borked beyond my ability to repair it (specifically Gnome went horribly wrong), I was spending more time troubleshooting my system than I was using it, and I wanted something that ‘just worked’. Since then I have installed Gentoo again on an old laptop I acquired from work and spent a bit more time getting to grips with the whole USE flags thing, my conclusions since then is that package.use and package.mask are crucially important to a smooth running system, especially if you want to get Mono working (my first attempt I set ~x86 in make.conf and upgraded everything - don’t think I had a clean emerge -u after that). Also the ability to optimise all compilations for file size makes a noticable performance difference on a laptop with a slow disk.
I use gentoo and I’m very happy with it. Gentoo is obviously not for everyone, but I have to say I can’t recall a single problem I’ve encountered since I’ve installed it (about a year and half ago) and that everything works great, despite my tendency to try the newest and not-yet-stable packages.
Good reasons for me to use gentoo include:
1. I can install only what I want and need
2. USE flags give me great control of the system
3. Good admin tools, that do their job good. IMHO gentoo’s tools, boot scripts and configuration are much better than those of the distros I’ve tried before (RH 8/9, Mandrake, …).
The first 2 reasons above are particularly important for me as my hardware is fairly outdated, so some creativity is needed to get good performance :-)
I haven’t tried Ubuntu; I’m sure it’s indeed good for the “masses” - and that’s very important - but a comparison between these two distros sounds to me like a comparison between apples and oranges.
I did the same thing a while ago :-) First I switched to Debian:
http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/jo/blog/archives/2004/07/12/transition-from-gentoo-to-debian/
and about half a year later I switched to Ubuntu:
http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/jo/blog/archives/2004/12/09/coupon-clipping/
http://lumumba.luc.ac.be/jo/blog/archives/2004/12/13/humanity-to-others/
Good luck with your fresh Ubuntu system!
I’m using gentoo on my dev box that also doubles as a server.
I’m considering switching to Ubuntu, which I have running
on a laptop, some bootable USB drives, etc.
I’ve used RH, Fedora, Debian (s/t/un), Slackware, DSL, Mepis, and Ubuntu.
To some extent all distros have moments when you want to ditch them. At the moment I find myself fighting gentoo more than I feel I’m getting out of it. PHP5 is not available in stable, for instance. And, more often than not, when I do an ‘emerge -u system && emerge -u world’ type sequence something crashes and I have to dig in and mess with everything to get it to update cleanly. Bug of the moment is one of the ~x86 sdl pieces is out of sync with the other ~x86 sdl pieces. I had to jump to ~x86 because I’m involved in a heavy media project and needed newer pieces than were found in stable. But that combo worked for past few months, crashes now.
I hit this web page via google because gcj went away and I was looking for clues. Now you have to spec USE of gcj to get gcj. That change up caught me by surprise. Means recompiling gcc. That’s a lot of work. Big fancy dualie box may make gentoo easier to mess with. On my 2200+ 1.5G memory box the user interface slows down even with a ‘nice’ in front of the emerge commands. So find myself wondering how green the grass is on the other side of the fence again.
I have only been a linux user for two years. I started with SUSE but was quickly frustrated with package dependency issue and there never seeming to be enough packages.
I then moved on to Ubuntu and really liked. I liked how I could just install things and be running in no time. I had a few issues with mplayer formats though.
I am still running Ubuntu on my desktop, but switched to gentoo on my laptop. I switched to Gentoo to learn and to try enlightenment. I have really liked gentoo and it has taught me a lot. I also like the diversity of packages that gentoo offers and teh ability to be bleeding edge. I also like knowing everything that goes on my machine.
That said, I think I will leave Ubuntu on my desktop as it is not my primary machine and I do not have as much time to devote to it as my laptop.
There’s my 2 cents.
I’m using linux since 6-7 yers, I’ve tried almost everything until I found Debian and I was finally really happy with it.
Here’s what I found.
Gentoo is best for those wanting state of the art bleeding edge software. For example, when you install Gentoo with rr4 gli — you get everthing and more than Ubuntu/Kubuntu ever dream of (binary). I would take rr4 LiveDVD over Kubuntu any day of the week! If I were only considering apt-get Debian–I would pick Simply Mepis over U/K as well. rr4, however, leaves them all in the dust!