On 3 Feb 2009, at 22:39, Grant Edwards wrote:
Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source. The main benefit claimed for this approach is that you get better performance because all executables are optimized for exactly the right instruction set. Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it parroted by so many people?
Back in Ye Olde Days, Gentoo was as cool & popular as Ubuntu is now. This is before Ubuntu existed, but when the perception of Debian as "boring" (because package versions in stable were so old) was already fairly established.
If I look at, say, Slashdot now, I see articles like "Setting Up Ubuntu On a PS3 For Emulation", "Jumping To Ubuntu At Work For Non- Linux Geeks" and "The Secret Lives of Ubuntu Users" but back before 2004.0, when the Gentoo installer disks and profiles were called 1.2 & 1.4, all the generic "using Linux" stories which happened to mention a distro by name, mentioned Gentoo. Honestly, Gentoo was in the news _all the time_ - that's how I learned about it when I was looking for a new distro (when Mandrake went bust for the second or third time).
The most popular distro will naturally have the largest number of over- enthusiastic recent Linux converts, and also the largest number of idiots. Also your mom. :P
So as you now regularly see blog posts or forum comments or social news stories about how "I love Ubuntu because I did this with it" or "Ubuntu's loads better than Windows because" - posts which completely ignore that the same thing could done just the same with ANY Linux distro - we used to see those comments made about Gentoo.
Just as now (a minority of) people will make idiotic claims about Ubuntu, back in the day the most common over-enthusiastic claim about Gentoo was "it's so |33t - it makes your whole computer faster". A couple of posts in this thread have given genuine anecdotes which support this, but when the claimant was blatantly an idiot (which inevitably was sometimes the case) then one can see how the claim might not seem credible to an outside & independent observer.
This is the background which the funroll-loops website satirised - "optimised executables" sounds just like it came from that site, and EXACTLY the sort of phrase that would've been used by a Gentoo fanboy at the time. "Performance" was another favourite word, always used blindly or with claims that the GUI felt snappier on Gentoo, rather than any actual benchmarks. I'm sure there was at least one amateur performance benchmarking article that came out at that time - showing Gentoo to be the fastest, of course - and which was immediately discredited because the competing distros used safer, more conservative defaults (for filesystem settings or something).
To be honest, I am surprised this notion of "optimised executables" has stuck around long enough that you've heard it, but it's an old joke to many of us who were around in 2004.
Stroller.
