Gentoo is a fantastic operating system. However, if you come from a "I don't want to do any work, but I just want to install something and use it" scenario, it may not be for you. For me personally, seeing as I cut my teeth back before all the distros this person listed existed, I used Slackware, and I used FreeBSD. Seeing as to me, I like compiling from source when I get the chance because my optimized toolchain makes improves the performance and robustness of my system. I'm not sure why the author of this article claims that he was going to "roll" his own Linux, as that is not technically correct. You can do similar things with other distros, but you have to use source packages instead of the binary ones. So seeing that he did not perform that route, it seems like the author was going to use Gentoo for one of its features (being portage), and rather than not read to see how it works and how to resolve errors that may exist, he decided to switch to another operating system, being Debian.
Gentoo isn't really about the software as much as it is about a "process". Based on the dialogue of the author, I would not recommend him to Gentoo anyway, as it seems he or she simply wants to play with Linux, or at least to simply have a "Linux based worksation". However, Gentoo is for those who want to get under the hood of their distribution. You can tune the software you put on it, and you can choose the level of integration it has with each other. If this is not your interest, then yes, move along. I used Debian for years as well, but as with any binary only managed pacakge system, I found it to be constraining. However, if I went back and used source based packages and used the tips for tuning and all that I have learned with Gentoo, I could make any distro behave the way I want. Bottom line, if you are not willing to read documentation and you are not interested in the inner workings for the operating system (i.e. you have no love for computer optimization, computer science, etc), then stay away from Gentoo. It's only for the bold.
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Gentoo Not for you
Posted by: Fletch on September 20, 2006 12:35 AMGentoo isn't really about the software as much as it is about a "process". Based on the dialogue of the author, I would not recommend him to Gentoo anyway, as it seems he or she simply wants to play with Linux, or at least to simply have a "Linux based worksation". However, Gentoo is for those who want to get under the hood of their distribution. You can tune the software you put on it, and you can choose the level of integration it has with each other. If this is not your interest, then yes, move along. I used Debian for years as well, but as with any binary only managed pacakge system, I found it to be constraining. However, if I went back and used source based packages and used the tips for tuning and all that I have learned with Gentoo, I could make any distro behave the way I want.
Bottom line, if you are not willing to read documentation and you are not interested in the inner workings for the operating system (i.e. you have no love for computer optimization, computer science, etc), then stay away from Gentoo. It's only for the bold.
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