Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on May 17, 2006 03:45 AM
One of the major advantages of Gentoo is missing from the article and the comments so far: A Gentoo system doesn't get outdated (provided you emerge every now and then). Any other distro, SuSE, Fedora, you name it, gets official support until the next version comes out or a little later, and then you have to upgrade to the next version if you want to stay up to date. I did that with SuSE 9.0 to 9.1, and ended up having to install it anew. When SuSE 9.1 got old and got no more updates apart from security patches, I found myself increasingly digging up source code from the net and compiling it - with lots of dependency errors, resulting in far more problems than Gentoo ever gave me.
Sure, doing a weekly update with emerge can take a night occasionally, but hey, I need to sleep, too. It's not as if we're all sitting in front of our computers, doing stuff, 24/7.
One more thing about portage: yes, there are very recent builds of most things, but mostly they are masked (meaning: not available if you only want a stable installation). Isn't stable Firefox still at 1.0.7 or so? In any case it used to be that a long time, when 1.5 was out already. If you want to play it safe and not unmask the unstable packages, the system will not necessarily be as up to date as a very recent distribution by someone else.
As for speed, Gentoo definitely outperforms the SuSE I had on the same system before. So, I'm very happy with my Gentoo, but wouldn't recommend it to the normal user with no geek interest either.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on May 17, 2006 03:45 AMSure, doing a weekly update with emerge can take a night occasionally, but hey, I need to sleep, too. It's not as if we're all sitting in front of our computers, doing stuff, 24/7.
One more thing about portage: yes, there are very recent builds of most things, but mostly they are masked (meaning: not available if you only want a stable installation). Isn't stable Firefox still at 1.0.7 or so? In any case it used to be that a long time, when 1.5 was out already. If you want to play it safe and not unmask the unstable packages, the system will not necessarily be as up to date as a very recent distribution by someone else.
As for speed, Gentoo definitely outperforms the SuSE I had on the same system before. So, I'm very happy with my Gentoo, but wouldn't recommend it to the normal user with no geek interest either.
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