Am Freitag, 24. Februar 2012, 21:03:47 schrieb John: > Hi folks, > > I've been using linux for about 12 years now, but only used DE's.
no problem. > I've got > ADD in the extreme and have poor memory retention so trying to learn things > 'UNIX' (command line and such) is just too difficult for me. I can do some > command line stuff but nothing more than getting time from someplace to > make my clock be correct, heh. then gentoo and its derivates are not for you. The first time you need to think about a problem (like compilation fails because some symbol in some lib is pointing to some outdated and not installed other lib) and you will be frustrated. > > I've been using SuSE/openSUSE now for all those 12 years but I'm becoming > somewhat disgruntled with the direction I feel it's going (don't ask, it'll > just get me started rantin' and ravin'). I've looked at Slackware, but the > package management looks just a little bit more than I can try to handle at > first without getting frustrated and scrubbing it off my hard drive. if you want to have something easy that works, opensuse and co do that. Their 'direction' is caused by the fact that they try to be fitting for people like *you*. Gentoo is for people who either new what they are doing or are able and willing to learn - and to spend some hours fixing stuff if something goes wrong. Just mentioning, getting my printer so far that it a) worked with current cups and b) printed nice pictures took 8h. Are you willing and able to go through that? Are you able to google for answers? Are you able and willing to read manuals, howtos and manpages and adapt to your situation? Are you at least willing to try really hard before you start asking others to solve your problems for you (ok, this list is full with people asking questions that could be solved with google, grep and thinking.. so.. forget this part...) If you said 'no' to one of the above, gentoo and its derivates are not for you. > > I've looked at a *LOT* of other distro's and too many use Gnome (I can't > stand it, that's my opinion so don't try to argue with me to change), some > are a bit too minimalistic and others too much like openSUSE is now - huge. > > I finally came upon Gentoo and for the past few days I've been reading and > looking at things and so far it seems to be what I'm wanting to switch to, > but here's my quandary: > > I'm dirt-poor and have only a dial-up connection. The Portage package > management seems extremely nice, but will it be a problem for me to upgrade > say just one package/app at a time? no > Will I be able to find a tarball of an > app I want to try out and be able to build it like I would with rpmbuild > (will it be as relatively easy as that)? Is there a 'repository' of apps > anywhere that I can go to to look and see if the app I normally use for > something is there? yes, on your harddisk > > There's probably more questions, but I best keep this short for now, lol. > Thanks for any replies and help with these things and I hope I made enough > sense for everyone to understand what I'm trying to get at. yes, and I am afraid you will be more happy with Suse, Slackware or Mepis. -- #163933
