[clue-tech] Taking the Gentoo Plunge?

[Nate Duehr]

> Ok,
>
> I'm thinking about taking the Gentoo plunge, and I've read *lots* of
> information about how difficult it is to setup (or not), how time
> consuming it is to setup and administer (or not), how patches bork the
> entire system (or not).  I'm not afraid to setup Gentoo on my system(s),
> I've used linux for years and years, but I wanted to get some sort of idea
> from local guys who actually RUN the distribution what their experience
> has been like.

I stopped running it except on an old laptop for only one main reason...
updates are a beast.  When you have to wait around for days (literally)
for an update to finish, it gets old real fast.  Otherwise, I liked it.

> If I do this I'm going to do it on 2 laptops, and 1 desktop (which doubles
> as a fileserver for things like MP3s, etc).  I prefer KDE to gnome but I
> can be converted.  I've most recently run Ubuntu, SuSE before that but
> I've used pretty much every distro out there over the years.

Gnome/KDE - doesn't matter.  There's good support for both.  Building them
from source is ultra-painful, so make a decision and stick to it.  :-)

> So, for those of you out there who run Gentoo, what's your experience been
> like?  Are the rumours true?  I've downloaded the recent 2007.0 release
> and I can tell you that the live DVD seems to perform better than hosted
> systems on my machine (I know it's strange, but it's true) and I did do a
> gentoo install 3-4 years ago, but just got frustrated after borking my
> install a few times.

If the "rumors" are that it's hard to load, no.  Time-consuming?  Yes.  No
one with a real job and life has time for that crap.  (GRIN)... but it was
pretty fun.  Also, you'll learn quickly that "weird" little things will
come up during upgrades or installs of some packages.  forums.gentoo.org
becomes your very best friend.

Gentoo is for people who have a LOT of time on their hands to tinker with
it, if you feel like having the latest updates.  I *never* recommend it
for servers... takes too much effort to keep it patched for security
issues.

If you're a "normal" person with no time to fiddle constantly, stick to a
distro where some nut is happy to recompile everything for you on his
ultra-whiz-bang quad-processor beast of a desktop and/or the build daemon
servers of that particular distro... heh...
-- 
Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com