Linked by Bob Minvielle on Wed 17th Jul 2002 19:18 UTC
There have been many articles as of late about the so called "source" distributions of Linux. Articles about "rpm hell" and how to get out of it. While I have been using Red Rat since the first release (and do have some things for and against it) there is no distribution that will please all of the people all of the time. Then again, that is what makes an OS like Linux nice, in my opinion. Choices. Today, Gentoo Linux is my choice.
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Gentoo really is a great distro. I first used it around 1.0-RC3, and it's gotten much better since then. First, the installation was tons simpler than that of any other Linux distro I've used. True, it was all command line, and you had to get in with nano and start editing files in /etc, but the straight-forwaredness of it was a welcome change from the complexity of other installs. The distro itself is a pleasure to use. It has nice little touches like optimizing your HD by default, renicing X to -10 by default, enabling the Freetype bytecode interpreter by default, and downloading and setting up the MS WebFont pack by default. The ebuild system is great. While there are occasional problems with compiles failing (which bite when you do something like KDE which needs to run overnight) I can chalk that up to using the 1.3b (beta) version. Hacking your own ebuilds is very easy, to the extent where it is rather simple to take standard source packages (ie. ones that use ./configure && make && make install) and write your own ebuilds for them. I've been messing around with getting Gentoo to work with the prelink tools (currently, all KDE apps segfault if you use prelink) and the ability to mess with core system ebuilds (like glibc and qt) and still get a consistant package database has been very helpful.