Just thought I'd throw my 2c into this discussion, since I'm a Gentoo user myself. Here are some of my opinions about Gentoo, in general I have had no stability problems, even keeping up to date - and the best thing is : No re-install when the next major version is released. Put up your hand if you have installed Mandrake 7.2, 8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 9.0 from scratch each time :) My recommendation - try it, you will not go back :) And the Gentoo forums are the best I have ever seen anywhere.
1) On optimising and compiling - The faster your machine the faster Gentoo packages can be installed, but the less difference the CPU/architecture optimisations make. So for a slower clocked machine, compiling will take longer, but the performance increase for optimisation will be larger. 2) Spread the load - If you have networked machines, Gentoo compiling can spread the load using distcc - this is ideal if you have an old slow laptop & a workhorse desktop. 3) USE flags - USE flags are the main reason that compiling from source is good - if you never use GTK you can tell programs not to bother compiling in support for it. 4) What is an ebuild - It is just a script that contains : where the source tarball can be downloaded from : where any patches can be gotten from : how to build the package (./configure; make; make install; kind of thing) - They are easy to write and modify, so when a project (eg KDE) has a new release, an ebuild can be created almost trivially, this is why Gentoo is almost always right up with a project for releases. - The portage tree is just a collection of ebuilds, if an ebuild is in the tree Gentoo can install that package 5) Bleeding edge - Gentoo has a single tree for ebuilds, and it is unified (ie, not downloading debs from other places), but this tree is filtered by various masks. The default mask is "stable" a package is usually marked stable when : The project itself declares that this is a stable version AND all dependancies of that package are marked as stable - You can mix and match the bleeding edge/stable trees with few hassles. 6) Compiling time - Yes it is a hassle, but if the app is already installed then it is no big deal, you can still use the app. For me on a 56k modem, DL time is more of a hassle. Cheers Brad
