On Tue, 2005-01-11 at 07:47 -0800, M. Edward Borasky wrote: > > Gentoo has some very firm camps on branding. On one side, we have the > > "Everything in Gentoo should be as close to upstream as possible!" and > > on the other side the "Gentoo brand everything!" guys. I wouldn't mind > > seeing a bit more branding, provided it didn't get to the point of being > > ridiculous (read Red Hat). I think the Gnome team has done a good job > > of finding a middle ground. Could we benefit from some sort of > > "branding" USE flag? I think so. > > OK ... here's my thinking. I visit DistroWatch every day and look at the > "Top Ten": > > 1 Mandrakelinux 1346 > 2 MEPIS 1329 > 3 SUSE 1083 > 4 Fedora 1056 > 5 Ubuntu 1024 > 6 Debian 960 > 7 KNOPPIX 860 > 8 Gentoo 655 > 9 Slackware 565 > 10 Damn Small 549 > > What's wrong with this picture? Well ... I would expect Mandrake, SUSE > and Fedora, with huge marketing budgets behind them, to be the top > three, even though, from what I hear, Fedora is the least stable, more > like a branded "sid" than anything else. :) > > And I expect Debian to be ahead of Gentoo. It's been around longer, it > has a bigger community, and more packages (although I think Gentoo is > growing a lot faster than Debian). > > No, the big surprises here are Ubuntu and Mepis. Both are "free as in > freedom" and "free as in beer", IIRC, both are Debian-based and both are > "desktop oriented". If Gentoo is to make it into the top five, which to > my way of thinking should be Mandrake, Suse, Debian, Gentoo and Fedora, > we need
Who ever said Gentoo was trying to make it into the top anything? We
work on Gentoo to make Gentoo better, not to compete with other
distributions. We fill many different niches, the desktop space being
only one.
> 1. More marketing/branding
We have a PR team.
> 2. Desktop orientation
Never.
If Gentoo were ever to become "desktop oriented" then I think we would
lose a large number of our users (and developers), especially the guys
from gentoo-server. Personally, I think making something "desktop
oriented" means dumbing it down, make it less featured, and adding eye
candy for the sake of attracting people who simply like the shiny
buttons and don't care about how the software works.
I have several "desktop" Gentoo boxes and also several boxes with no GUI
of any kind. One of the things that I like is the fact that I can use
Gentoo on all of these machines and not have to resort to using
something else because Gentoo is geared for the desktop and has no
command-line tools to speak of.
> 3. Stability and security (I think we're there already)
Stability. Security. Desktop. Pick two...
> 4. As many packages as "sarge".
We aren't in a contest with Debian. I could go around adding tons of
worthless packages that nobody will use just to increase the number of
available packages, but I would much rather *improve* what we have than
add more useless cruft. I know that many of our developers feel the
same.
> Is there a "gentoo-marketing" mailing list? :)
No, and I hope there never is one... ;]
> How difficult would it be to integrate Debian source ("dsc") packages
> and source RPMs into Portage?
Difficult? I'm sur enot very. But why would you even *want* to do it?
We have plenty of RPM-based packages in portage already. Nobody
releases packages as "Debian-only", so having Debian source support is
pretty worthless. There would be nothing stopping us from getting the
source tarball and the patches ourselves and using an ebuild. Same with
source RPM.
> > As for the GUI tools, well, here's my take on it, taken from the
> > gentoo-catalyst mailing list when someone asked about a graphical
> > spec-file creation tool for catalyst.
> >
> > "It really boils down to one thing. Would you rather us stop working on
> > catalyst and focus on making a GUI for it which would be inflexible and
> > only capable of limited functionality, or would you rather us spend our
> > time improving catalyst with new features and better documentation?
>
> I struggled with catalyst for a couple of weeks and gave up. I
> personally have no need for a tool to make stages or package CDs or
> "Gentoo Release Media". For that matter, I have no need for a graphical
> installer.
You have no need for a tool to make stages or "Gentoo Release Media",
but you spent a couple weeks playing with it?
> My modus operandi in installing Gentoo is to do the appropriate stage3
> install for the subarch, followed by loading the desktop from the
> appropriate package CD, followed by "emerge --sync; emerge -uvD --newuse
> world", followed by installing the add-on packages unique to my
> applications, scientific computing and algorithmic composition and
> synthesis of music. The whole process takes close to a full weekend on
> my ~ 1GHz P3 and Athlon T-bird. I've got it down to four "bash" scripts
> plus canned "/etc/fstab", etc. files, though, so I can sit and watch.
Ahh... now I see why you played with catalyst. You were trying to ease
your effort in recreating your particular environment.
> What I want from catalyst is the ability to make high-quality
> Gentoo-based LiveCDs easily ... to be blunt, as easily as a re-master of
> Knoppix can be made. The compromise I'm willing to make is that i686 or
> better is required. The compromises I'm *not* willing to make are the
> deletion of Fortran from the gcc set, since some of the software I use
> requires Fortran, and any less than the most comprehensive "just works"
> hardware detection available at any point in time on the resulting
> LiveCD.
So what you want is the same thing the poster on gentoo-catalyst wanted,
for someone else to do all the work to match his specific needs when the
tool is already available and already capable of everything that he
wanted, but was too lazy to take the time to figure out?
I'll be honest about something. We work on catalyst for ourselves. We
implement the features that we need to improve our lives in creating
"Gentoo Release Media". We do add other features to catalyst, as they
are requested, but we aren't gearing it towards end users, so we don't
spend time doing things we can't use, like making automated tools to do
work which would still require the same level of knowledge of the
internals of catalyst to use, but would do so graphically rather than a
fairly simple spec-file.
> I don't know who's the best in the hardware detection area. Knoppix does
> everything I need except picking up the right vsync and screen size for
> my monitor. I have little experience with others; the last Red Hat
> install I did was RH9, and it seemed to be slightly less than Knoppix.
> I've never tried Mandrake or SuSE, and my recent Debian experience is
> limited to installing an ancient Celeron laptop from "sarge" boot
> floppies.
Knoppix is probably the best, which is why we use the Knoppix tools in
doing our LiveCD auto-detection on supported architectures.
--
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Operational/QA Manager
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux
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