[clue-tech] Gentoo

[Nate Duehr]

Been there, done that... have the "I was a short-lived Gentoo fanboi"
sticker and logbook sign-off.

It may be a few percentage points faster than the same apps compiled
without optimizations, but the time you'll waste constantly re-building
for security patches for everything under the Sun, will eat any
productivity gains you think you'll get from it.

Cheaper/faster to just put a faster CPU in the machine(s).  Seriously. 

Oh and like everything else, sooner or later someone makes a mistake on
the dev team.  In packaged distros this usually means the package won't
install.  On a distro that requires you rebuild all dependencies
(sometimes), sometimes the broken part is an install script that totally
screws up multiple things on the system.

Gentoo is for people who like to waste large amounts of time.  At the
end of the day, if you wanna get something actually done -- stick with a
pre-built binary-based distro.

My opinion, anyway...

--
  Nate Duehr
  nate at natetech.com

On Mon, 04 Jan 2010 11:33 -0700, "Jason Ash" <wizardofki at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As some of you know, I tried out LFS last fall. While this was a great
> learning experience, sorting out and installing all of the
> dependencies for things like KDE was a headache. Not to mention I
> couldn't get KDE to work. Four valid reasons to do LFS (IMHO) are:
> 1) The learning experience (the best reason)
> 2) Specific custom requirements (not me)
> 3) Exercising technical know-how (not yet there)
> 4) Micromanagement of your OS (I won't)
> 
> I remember someone saying at one of our meetings that he uses Gentoo
> because it's optimized and he never has to upgrade (since portage is
> always up-to-date). So, I just got finished installing the Gentoo base
> system, and I'm installing the KDE4 meta-package. The nice thing about
> Gentoo is that it automatically downloads all the needed dependencies
> in addition to the requested package and compiles them from source.
> I'm using -O2 and pentium4 optimizations. So far, KDE4 in its entirety
> has taken 26 hours to download and compile. I'll let you know how it
> goes and if it's faster.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jason Ash
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