On 22/10/14 00:57, Israel G. Lugo wrote: > Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's got a steepish learning > curve, yes, but the documentation is very good; sadly, much of it was > lost a few years ago, due to a bad mishap on the community Gentoo Wiki > server, apparently without any backups. Back in the day, if I wanted to > learn about Samba, I'd Google "howto linux samba" and Gentoo's Wiki > would usually be among the first 3 hits. Their devs take stability very > seriously; it's a rolling distro, but there is still a reasonable > stabilization period for each package as new versions come out, during > which any open bugs may hold up the package until they're fixed.
I certainly remember this, and miss it. The Gentoo documentation, and indeed the experience of compiling everything, was excellent. I still miss some of the tools that Gentoo had in Debian/CentOS (and the stage3 live CD is still my goto 'system rescue tool' :)) But.. I don't use it any more for anything serious. It's too much upkeep, and when the the included/maintained rc scripts for <some package> do inevitably fail to catch a corner case -- far more likely if you're using an overlay -- then you're left with little choice but to start modifying/writing your own. > It's all about choice. In my view, Gentoo is no better or worse than > Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu. Different species, they all make for a > better ecosystem. I was mildly unfair in the way my response was worded, but I do hold that the Gentoo way of doing things is much simpler than that of other distributions. This was, in my experience, a double-edged sword. YMMV, etc. -- Tom
