I heard Mark Bainter said: > Look. If you like what redhat and other distros are doing why don't > you use those distros? I'm not trying to be mean, it's an honest > question.
I don't know about Carlos, but here's my own reason. I use Gentoo to save time. All in all, I'm freaking tired of computers as a whole. They don't work, they crash, or you have to spend hours to get them to work the way you want, or they try to force ads/trojans/spyware on you, or want to force THEIR (generally corporate) ways on you. I tried and ended up staying with Gentoo because it Just Fucking Works. Installing new software is easy. Maintainance is very easy (Gentoo's init subsystem, among other things, is the single best I had the luck to come across). And the default packages are very recent, which matters quite a lot for a workstation. Neither RedHat, Mandrake or SuSE are gifted with that ease of keeping the OS very up to date. Not without a cost in stability, anyway, and instability is a major source of time waste. But I dislike having to jump through countless hoops to get Gentoo installed. I don't care about having to compile the base system, as long as I can be doing something else in the meanwhile. But I would love a small curses-based utility that would let you configure the system, would ask for the base ebuilds to install, and then do its business on its own for as long as it wants. Including the installation of a default precompiled kernel, if at all possible. Configuring a kernel for compilation is a lengthy and annoying process. Well, actually, having to compile a kernel isn't so bad, if only you didn't have to configure it manually, option by option by option by option. Maybe compiling automatically after some Known To Work defaults (maybe that of RH or MDK, since they work well), possibly with some USE modifiers, would be doable? That's exactly the Gentoo way of doing things, after all. So, to answer your question, I -like- what Gentoo is doing, but I don't like ALL of it, and the installation is something I indeed don't like much. As far as what I look for in an OS is concerned, Gentoo is the best choice so far, but can still be improved, and an installation tool would be such an improvement. Sorry about the F word. What can I say, I'm kind of fond of it. :) > But if this is what you want, you are sure as heck welcome to start > your own distribution based on gentoo with a graphical installer. I wonder why, whenever this kind of 'ease of use' thread erupts, people often confuse automation of the installation and graphical installation? The two are actually almost entirely orthogonal, and most people who would like an installation tool, don't give a flying duck about it being graphical. Or so I think, anyway. :) -- S. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
