Alejandro Escalante Medina wrote:
Debian has a great packager but iit is and overly cryptic distribution for me yet, with a very difficult installer.
So, is it Gentoo a good distribution for me?
The Gentoo installation is long-winded, and quite complicated - there is no interface to help you do things, its all done by commands at the bash prompt. A typical install involves working with tools such as fdisk and chroot, and hand-editing quite a few config files. If you choose to go for compilation (e.g. stage1 or stage2) then you are probably in for quite a wait, depending on system spec.
I am a knowledgeable linux user, that's ok, but the problem is that I don't have too much spare time to fiddle with a distribution that's too harsh on the user.I wouldn't really describe gentoo as harsh on the user, but yes, you will probably find that you do need to spend quite a bit of time setting things up. Especially during the installation and the few days that follow.
I have a personal web server I need to be up, running and secure. I'm not too much of a graphical user since I'm stuck with you-know-what for several reasons, though, I need an X desktop around to use several applications I like/need (guarddog, for instance).
Gentoo has a great package management system, installing things like this is a breeze.
Maybe Gentoo is a nice distro to try kernel 2.6 ;)
Thats another great thing about gentoo - it is very easy to get up a system running all of the "cutting-edge" stuff, e.g. kernel 2.6, udev, nptl, ...
In most cases, its no different from getting a system up and running with the "standard" tried and tested stuff.
Then... finally, what do you think? Should I change to Gentoo or follow my path to Fedora?
Give Gentoo a try. If you have enough hard disk space, you can install both and make a final decision at a later date. I guarantee that you will be impressed by gentoo, but if you are pushed for time, then the lengthy compiles and amount of time required to get things running as you want them may get to you.
Daniel
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