Grant wrote:
In December 2006 I started a thread titled "Is Gentoo Healthy?" in
which I was roundly put down for raising the possibility that the
decline in the number of Gentoo users could possibly affect the
remaining Gentoo users in a negative way.
Is everyone still toeing that line? The Gentoo Weekly Newsletter
hasn't been published in almost two months. Is Gentoo destined to be
just another distro starved for contributors and struggling to stay up
to date? If so, I really misjudged it. The meta approach of Gentoo
is superior to any other in my mind, and I think it's growth and
potential are being stunted by the "we don't need them" attitude which
perpetuates Gentoo's lack of usability features for beginners.
Gentoo needs as many users as possible to reach its potential. It's a
short-sighted mistake to think that non-contributing users do Gentoo
no good. Non-contributing users become contributors as time passes.
Car mechanics all start as car drivers.
- Grant
The startup I work for was bought last Oct. I spent four months
migrating to Redhat ES 4.0 as well as dealing with some odd internal
software decisions at the new company. Six months later the whole system
still doesn't run as well or give me the flexibility I had with Gentoo.
On top of that I get to deal with a poorly implemented, thought out,
and extremely frustrating home grown package management tool that wishes
it was one tenth as powerful as portage. Hell most days I'd rather have
straight up RPM over the internal tools. And for anyone that thinks
Fortune 1000 companies back port fixes of their PHP 5.1 package because
their chosen distro doesn't include it (or ninety other packages we use)
or test better than unknown thousands of Gentoo users running ~x86, let
me disabuse you of that notion right now.
The grass always looks greener on the other side and in regards to
Gentoo, it ain't.
kashani
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