The "Gentoo is difficult" thing has been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, so please excuse the lengthy reply... None of this is intended as flame, merely as an opposing viewpoint.
On Sun, 9 Nov 2003 21:47:37 -0600 "brian connolly" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | From a business perspective... you've just set up 10 possible hurdles | to lose users and patrons. If it were Vegas, that'd be that game no | one played. On the other hand, by removing those steps, you're removing ten possible places for a user to set up their system in the way that they want it, and adding in ten possible places to annoy the user with sub-optimal defaults. I would find it very inconvenient if I lost control of any of those stages. If you disagree, no problem -- that's what GLIS is for. For me (speaking as a user with a half dozen Gentoo boxes), Gentoo has by far the easiest install of any distro that I've tried. Other than LFS, it's the only distribution that let me set up my discs the way I wanted them (LVM with lots of partitions, and a mixture of jfs and ext3) without making me have to second-guess what some fancy 'user friendly' tool might be doing behind the scenes. The Gentoo install doesn't try to force a load of unnecessary software on me (it's easy enough to fix it so that vim gets installed rather than nano). There aren't any ports open on the default install. I don't get the distribution's choice of desktop environment forced upon me by default. I don't get some awful generic kernel -- I get one that has what I want and only what I want in it. I don't have to compile my editor manually because I can enable or disable all those extra features using USE flags rather than having to rely upon a distribution's default settings. I get exactly what I ask for, and nothing more, which for me is perfect. The way things stand at the moment, there are a lot of choices to be made during the install. The install docs do a good job of explaining those choices, and they usually suggest reasonable defaults if you'd rather that someone else made the decisions for you. If you don't mind reading the documentation, there's nothing particularly difficult about the install. But what if I didn't want a super-flexible install, and would prefer to hide behind a pretty front end? Well, thanks to the GLIS guys, that's also an option. You need only type in two commands (assuming you don't have a wierd network setup, but if GLIS makes it onto the LiveCDs then this won't be an issue): wget http://glis.sf.net/glis-current-beta bash glis-current-beta and the rest of the install can be done from behind a cute dialog interface. From there, installing Gentoo is no harder than installing, say, RedHat, with the added advantage that it is possible to do selected stages manually if you prefer. Similarly, if you don't feel like making your own kernel, and would rather stick with a fairly generic, sub-optimal kernel, then genkernel can do all the work for you. So, really, Gentoo *can* be installed in whatever way you want. You can go for an install that doesn't try to be too clever for its own good, or you can let a pretty front end do all the work for you. The accusation of Gentoo being "difficult" does not seem correct or fair to me (not since 1.4, anyway...), and I'd wager that a lot of the complaints come from people who have not actually sat down and tried to follow the install docs. Yes, the surface is a bit different. No, there is nothing fundamentally different underneath. It's just that the choice between a totally manual install similar to LFS or a dialog-driven install similar to RedHat is there. As with everything else, during the install Gentoo does what the user wants it to do. Your mileage may, of course, vary. And, of course, if at the end of the day Gentoo doesn't do what you want, it also leaves you free to either fix it or choose another distro :) -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail: ciaranm at gentoo.org Web: http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
