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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Given some of the earlier comments from other BSD users, I suppose it's not that surprising that some of you might label the lot of us as "sore losers" or somesuch. If I were to use the same metric, I would take the inflammatory statements favoring linux and arrive at a similar conclusion. As was pointed out, there just aren't that many BSD articles being posted here, so most of us BSD users tend not to post and the responses you will get are more likely to come from the advocacy crowd.
On that note, I think OSNews does a fair job of covering FreeBSD news (the other BSD's I follow less closely and cannot comment on). The FreeBSD community mostly exists in the mailing lists hosted at freebsd.org; the use of web sites (whether focused solely on FreeBSD or covering a number of systems), newsgroups, etc. is not as pervasive as it is with the linux community. Covering FreeBSD in any greater level of detail would require following the mailing lists (as Jeremy Andrews of kerneltrap has sometimes done) and being able to cull the wheat from the chaff. The volume alone makes it time consuming, and the latter requirement makes it, shall we say, non-trivial.
ObGentoo: my thoughts on the number of linux distributions have vacillated between "choice is good" and "can't someone do it right?". For me, doing it right means installing and upgrading from source whenever possible. So, when I installed Gentoo a month or two ago, I was pleasantly surprised that: 1.it was done right, and 2.it didn't muck with my FreeBSD partitions (as RedHat has done more than once). I've used the FreeBSD ports system for some time now and portage provided the same functionality I needed. I don't remember if the source for other things like ls, tail, etc. was included but I assume it's in there somewhere.
The biggest complaint I had about Gentoo was that it only provided one editor during the install process and that if you were not careful the editor would wrap your lines and you'd end up with botched config files. In a source only distribution, you should expect to get people who have been using unix for some time. Give them a little more credit and provide a set of editors, or at the very an editor most of them are already familiar with.
Oh, and it is because of Gentoo that I was introduced to GRUB, which makes a much better boot manager than almost anything else I've ever used.