Im just a ""i hate rpm"" kinda guy... and well... point and click distros arent that much easier to get to do what you want... the main thing harder about gentoo is the install... package managment a large part of what makes things easier/harder is much nicer on gentoo... with a little bit of struggling and screwing round u can get it to do just about anything... makes you understand what your doing and why.
P ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark Fisher" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, September 03, 2003 2:59 PM Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1236319,00.asp -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday 03 September 2003 11:09 am, Patrick wrote: > the thing still is that he really has to know what hes doing > and linux will hopefully never be a moron's operating system I totally agree. I guess this all comes down to 2 philosophies on the competing ends of the spectrum. On the one side you have Mr Gentoo/BSD/Debian where you have intelligent yet configurable installation system's but ultimately you have control of your own computer. The software is written by yourself and your peers in the open source community and so 'holes' are picked up and fixes available very quickly. On the other side, you have Mr Windows who does everything for you, as a result you are unsure of exactly how it is all put together and so troubleshooting is often unintuative and results in a fresh installation as frankly it would be quicker. You are ultimately trusting your systems to their programmers. When there are security problems you must wait for them to agree and to make the fix avalable. Then there are the distro's blurring the distinction like Mr RedHat and Mr Mandrake who, while are strictly Linux, have a large amount of automation like Mr Windows. For someone like me, who likes to remain in control of their system, by definition that system has to be largely un-automated. For the next person [like the article writer] who are less concerned about the inner workings, automation scripts are ideal - as long as they work (!)[have you ever tried to fix a Mandrake box whose script's have failed?]. It's just horses for courses isnt it? I hope Linux does continue for many years to come, and that it leads to Skynet's, I mean Redmond's, ultimate demise. But not every computer user is a computer professional, so the Windows approach - however undesirable - will always be the popular one [by numbers]. Im glad that Linus has started working on developing Linux for the desktop as im sure distro's like Mandrake, Suse and RedHat will gain alot from it. Maybe then Linux, in the form of user-friendly distro's, will become more approachable to the man in the street. Like Lindow's - while I dont 'like' it as it is now, I acknowledge that in 5 years time I will probably look back on it being a breakthrough project and something which shaped modern day computing. As for us? Well, in that same hope - we'll all still have Gentoo and other bleeding edge distro's... so we will continue to point and laugh, I guess :P > a really good example is postfix .. the further it goes the more > it progresses to become the best MTA available ( no flames plz :) ) For the religious statement or the top posting ;o) - -- Mark -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE/VeWvzrmqzOOQUj8RAqThAJwMvhXmyQ1F1mNLQy6aiMI1ym5bKwCfazPx 9pNJ74h2LBZ8JRf1edKCBh8= =geHG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
