On 12/24/2009 9:07 AM, Duncan wrote:
Lie Ryan posted on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:08:48 +1100 as excerpted:
IMO Gentoo's edge was not about having the most cutting edge software
(pun not intended), but rather "having a choice". With Gentoo, you get
to choose which USE-flag to (not) include; you got to choose the kernel
options and also to use genkernel; then you've got a choice to run a
antiquated, full-stable, half-stable, ~arch, or overlay; you are free to
choose how antiquated or cutting edge you want your system to be. And
Gentoo's portage makes living the picky eater's life much easier than if
you have to compile packages and its dependencies manually to separate
the vegetables (or meats if you're a vegetarian; or pork if you're a
Muslim; or cows if you're a Hindi; or whatever taboo or personal
distrust you have).
You're right about the choice, of course, but... well, the whole kde3
thing has nicely illustrated the issues stable gentooers have.
To this day I'd not call kde4 ready for stable yet, and CERTAINLY not as
stable and usable as kde-3.5.10. 4.4 should be getting close, I expect
it'll be like a release candidate traditionally is, it could be stable if
it had to be, but there's a few more bugs they want to kill before it's
fully released. 4.3 is late beta, 4.2 was early beta, a LOT of SERIOUS
bugs still hanging around, 4.1 was post-freeze alpha, and 4.0... was very
early technology demo, mostly prototype, from a user perspective.
well, I usually used GNOME, so I more-or-less missed the KDE chaos
(though I heard them often).
That's not the sort of thing stable users enjoy, for sure. Really,
neither do they tend to enjoy the constant updates Gentoo has, changing
their work environment out from under them. Good Gentooers soon learn
that if they're updating less than once a month, the updates DO pile up,
and the process DOES get rough. By three months, an upgrade gets
difficult and stressfull, by six months, it's getting easier to start
from a brand new stage-3, by a year, which is what Gentoo /does/ /try/ to
support, a brand new stage-3 is generally going to be much easier than
the exotic bugs you'll get trying to update in place. Yet stable users
normally /want/ their stuff stable for a year or more, and expect no
serious problems on update within their release slot, even a year or more
out. The all-at-one-time release upgrade, OTOH, is assumed to be the
normal case. Meanwhile, gentoo support for stale packages disappears
rather soon, relatively, and users are forced into either not updating
any more (no security updates) or upgrading. The enterprise/LTS
distribution releases at least have a support timeclock that people can
schedule their computing life around.
On that point, I'd agree with you. Gentoo users have either the choice of:
1) keeping up with the rolling update every day, either the rolling
stable or ~arch tree or a mix
2) update every 2-3 years from stage 3
but you can't update every 6-months or so with Gentoo; not smoothly
enough. That's one thing missing from Gentoo's choice; don't know if
anyone misses it though. Most fully stable users are in server
environment and would go to choice #1 while most desktop/laptop users
would use their computer everyday to keep up with daily updates. That
sort of implies people that only uses their computer occasionally (once
or twice a month?) is not suitable for Gentoo. Those kind of users
aren't really Gentoo's target users, so I doubt there is a significant
portion of people that fell into this third category.
As I mentioned above, it took the kde3/4 fiasco to really open my eyes to
this, but open them it most certainly did! Generally speaking,
enterprise and debian stable are the only ones supporting kde3 still,
even tho kde4 isn't yet ready to fill its shoes for production machines.
For me, I run a mostly stable system and unmasks a few packages that I
used most frequently since those are the software that I have the time
to test thoroughly since I work with them all the time. I've been
running a python 3 overlay (very unstable at that time), but I'm not
willing to run a full ~arch since most of those software I don't use
often enough anyway.
Of course, that's where Gentoo excels. It gives you the choice and
ability to do just that, even if it's not that well supported. But in
fact, because it's so easy
Put that *because it's so easy* in bold; gentoo's portage makes such
setup easy, your "choice" is never limited by tools that is hard-coded
to makes such setup difficult to manage.
and so necessary for stable users at times,
there's /enough/ people doing it, that it generally works out
/reasonably/ well.
that's why I love the easy part.
