On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 8:23 AM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > Both are rolling distros. Both can be build up from sources, although > Arch makes the binary install path the default for its (new) users, > as well as recovery of binaries that get deleted or become corrupted.
Arch doesn't offer the equivalent of USE flags does it? Virtually any distro will let you build a package from sources - typically with the goal of obtaining the same binary that the distro distributes. The main distinction Gentoo has is that building from source is the main supported installation method, and the tailoring of packages so that they are unique to each system is fairly well-supported. You could build all your own packages on Debian from source and install them, but there wouldn't be much point in doing that. Unless you basically build them with the same settings Debian is already using (maybe you could get away with a very minor CFLAGS tweak or something like that) you are pretty likely to run into problems. If you are just going to use the Debian settings, you might as well just install their binaries. The main use case for building from source on something like Debian would be if you just want to apply a patch to a single package, ideally something without a lot of reverse dependencies. > > Both distros offer Systemd. Yup - the arch docs are actually pretty useful for anybody using Systemd on Gentoo since many of the Gentoo docs are a bit openrc-centric, though that is changing. > The notable difference is Arch has some of the best documataion of any > linux distro; Gentoo struggles to document many key components. Interestingly enough people used to say the same thing about Gentoo - when I look at the Arch documents they tend to look a lot like how the Gentoo docs looked in the mid-2000s. People in my local user group often commented that they ran Debian but usually referenced the Gentoo docs. > Arch Linux is the 8th most popular linux distro, whilst Gentoo, > despite being 3 years older, is number 47, if you believe what various > sites say. I'm sure Arch is more popular these days, but I wouldn't put TOO much stock in distrowatch. Heck, I just checked my user agent and it says: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/37.0.2062.94 Safari/537.36 Good luck figuring out that I'm running Gentoo from that. Since Gentoo uses rolling releases it is a bit hard to get hard numbers on the install base. At my local linux user group people running Ubuntu would always be happy to grab CDs when a new version came out (one of the attendees used to get them to hand out). That made sense since with Ubuntu/Debian you tend to do just minor patching between releases and then you practically re-install everything except /home during major releases, especially if you followed LTS. With Gentoo nobody really does it that way, and we don't get the quarterly news site "new release" posts. Bottom line is that it is hard to measure Gentoo popularity. I've been using Gentoo since the early 2000s and in practice I can't really see any decline, even if there aren't as many devs as there once were. -- Rich
