On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:40 AM, Martin DeMello <[email protected]>wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 7:48 PM, John Haltiwanger > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Not sure if you are still wondering, but my experience most recent > > experience with Gentoo (March 09) has been a mess of overlays, something > > that was never an issue before. To get an even halfway recent ebuild for > an > > app I had to jump through a bunch of overlay hoops, with each overlay > > potentially adding incompatabilities. The net effect is that the main > > portage tree felt stagnant. When I used Gentoo as the deployment Linux > when > > I administered a computer lab in 2006, I never even heard mention of an > > overlay. Now it seems that adding an overlay is the first step mentioned > in > > installing apps in Gentoo. > > Have you tried Sabayon? It seemed a lot more vibrant than Gentoo > proper, though I finally decided to jump ship to Arch instead. > > martin > I actually have tried Sabayon, yes. Unfortunately it is condemnably slow (strange for a source based OS...) and ran into too many configurations to consider it as a full time OS. It is truly beautiful and the LiveCD works well when it works, so I specifically suggested Sabayon as a Live OS for an artist friend. I hope they iron out some of the rough spots, because I think their design aesthetics and development philosophy are great. Arch has the user base where most problems one can encounter have already been solved, a near perfect repository for non-distro (read: user supported) packages, is fast, and forces one to learn how to configure something when they want to use it. This last step may be a reason for some to stay away, but I assert that this is the key to Arch's stability.
