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The only saving grace to this article was the last few paragraphs, as it seemed to me that the author did not understand Gentoo's purpose and scope. I was almost about to suggest that the author run Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE, or someother "user-friendly-super-gui-don't-use-your-brain" ditros, but it seemed as if he or she stated his or her purpose as explaining Gentoo's lack of ease of installation to new users. So...okay...we have heard about that already. Gentoo may or may not be a good avenue for beginners, but the reason I like suggesting it for beginners as for those who are really serious about learning Linux, it is a good way of learning it as it lets you turn screws and bolts. Many users jump from Windows thinking "where the hell is my start menu?", and while a GUI can be used on top of Linux based operating systems, it doesn't really entail what Linux is. Those GUI's generally run on top of Solaris, FreeBSD, etc., so that doesn't really give someone the knowledge of what Linux is. And again, while I too am a Gentoo user, I certainly have my fair share of complaints at the current direction of Gentoo, and for that matter, the Linux kernel itself. However, I'm also very patient, and as long as the developer community is willing to listen to bug findings and accept suggested fixes, then I have no real reason to complain because all are human, and all are prone to err. I am using kernel 2.6.16 at the moment, but I think my last kernel that I liked was 2.6.7. I think the USB support has taken a turn for the worse since that version, and then there are the issues with udev, hotplug, etc, as far as it seems to be a moving target with implementation and functionality. I'm not saying there really is anything wrong with this, but really, shouldn't this all occur in the 2.7 tree? Isn't that the purpose of having the understood development versions? It seems that 2.6 became weird in that fashion as opposed to the past. Getting back on the subject, I'm not too fond of Gentoo moving away from the way applications and services were intended to run, and moving them to a standard that Gentoo has created. My main complaint is how in the golden olden days, rp-ppoe, pptp, etc used to have their configs stored in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/ppp, and now there are strange start/stop scripts that are created in<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/init.d that are usually net., and then in the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/conf.d/net config file, there are options that are never really fully documented (and yes, I know of the<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/conf.d/net.example file as well....it doesn't cut it. I would think these changes would be documented in a document on Gentoo's site, but based on what one of the developer's have stated, I still do not see this working properly (more specifically, the functionality of<nobr> <wbr></nobr>/etc/ppp/ip-up. Oh well, I'm not going to get into all the specifics, but I can certainly say there are small issues surfacing, and while I don't mind tolerating these from time to time, but if too many of them occur, then it makes me unfunctional in my environment, and I have to find higher ground from which to gain support.

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