On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Grant Edwards <gra...@visi.com> wrote: > AFAICT, the "performance" benefit due to compiler optimization > is practically nil in real-world usage.
It used to make a difference, but not anymore with today microprocessors. > In my experience the huge benefit of source-based distros such > as Gentoo is elimination of the library dependency-hell that > mires other binary-based distros. maybe redhat had that problem, but others (debian based distros for example) doesn't have dep hell AFAICS (I run Debian and Ubuntu based servers and desktops) > The second benefit is that with Gentoo, upgrading a system > actually works over the long-run. With RedHat/Mandrake, things > would gradually deteriorate to the point where the system was > unmaintainable, Same point. Maybe only a problem with RH. > The third main benefit I've seen is that there are vastly more > packages available for Gentoo. Hm.. Depends on what packages you're interested. You have no commercial support if you run Gentoo from -for example- VMware. > Putting together and > maintaining an ebuild appears to take a lot less work than > putting together and maintaining a binary RPM package. Maybe. I haven't tried to make a RPM package, but I tried DEB. It's almost as easy as with Gentoo. > Are the real benefits of Gentoo too hard to explain to the > unwashed masses, so instead they're told the fairy tale about > imporoved performance? Gentoo has -from my point of view- only one benefit: if you're a developer, you'll love Gentoo as every dev-dependency is already installed. Other than that, I see none. Now, if Gentoo devs could be as kind as -for example- Ubuntu devs, that would rock. But they aren,t and so -after 7 years- I'm looking for another distro to migrate to. Kubuntu is one of my favorites. I'm testing Fedora and openSuSE. Who will win? Gentoo just doesn't make sense anymore for me - unless you're a masochist :)
