I used gentoo for about three months, while I agree with most people on the list that its not worth the time it takes to build everything (I've gone back to mandrake now) I can definitely say that it was faster than any other distribution I've used on this machine.
No one seems to have mentioned gentoo's kernel which might be the reason for its superior performance, the default kernel has the low-latency and pre-emptive patches applied. Obviously the kernel can be used with any other distributions so its still no reason to go out and install gentoo. Also I think the reason gentoo users claim that emerge has more software than other distributions (which I don't think it does) it because the developers dont seem to mind putting popular non-gpl binaries in the portage tree (its not 'strictly source'). Without adding any extra non-offical sources (such as plf for mandrake) you can emerge the nvidia binaries, the binary flash plugin, the quake binaries and all the 'evil' decrypting dvd players, what people dont realise is that other disributions leave out this software for a reason. I don't agree with all the people who say gentoo is a completely useless distro, I don't think its great as a desktop distro or even a server distro (probably not such a great idea to have a compiler on a server for security reasons) it could be really usefull as a 'meta-distribution' (which is what Daniel Robbins explicitly states it is on the gentoo site) for quickly building custom systems such a pvr or a group of boxes for a clustered environment. Gentoo does appear to have its place but I don't think its on the desktop. -- ---------------------------------------------------- :: Myles Byrne | myles.byrnewebservices.com :. ---------------------------------------------------- -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
