[CLUE-Tech] distro question

[Collins Richey]

On Thu, 10 Jun 2004 22:30:05 -0600
Collins Richey <erichey2 at comcast.net> wrote:

Just a wrap on this fine discussion. The original poster asked for
gentoo experiences, but we covered a lot of other fine distros as well.
It all comes down to preferences. I like gentoo, but it's definitely not
"one size fits all." About the only one we didn't cover is Slackware,
and I like that one as well.

Since I don't run a corporate setup (you need to pay to have someone to
blame when it breaks <g>), I much prefer the "free as in beer" approach.
That boils down to Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware. Since I can't tolerate
the GNU/Linux religion (sure, you can ignore it if you like the
distro) and since I don't like the BSD style bootscripts (yes, others
are available) in Slackware, I'm left with Gentoo which just fits like
an old pair of slippers.

Two additional aspects of Gentoo bear noting, and I didn't emphasize
this enough in my CLUE presentation - the documentation and the user
group(s). There is a L-O-T of documentation, and this means a lot of FMs
to RTFM! Gentoo is just different enough from your average distro that
even experienced users may fail to RTFM carefully. The main user list
(gentoo-user) has swelled to almost firehose proportions in the past
year. A lot of those clogging the list are linux and gentoo newbies, and
the old timers and developers do a pretty good job of fielding the usual
repetitive questions, only getting snippy occasionally. As is the
case with any large user list, the occasional troll visits the list
to waste bandwidth - right now there are two of them!

Keep those cards and letters coming in.

-- 
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( CR ) Collins Richey
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