"Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News. 'The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins; the following developers recently left the Gentoo project: Daniel Robbins' Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-03-10
gentoo is surely not for non-geeks. If you don't know what you are doing, you shouldn't be using gentoo. It'll never work out. Certain technical skills are a requirement. It's no good if you are so unskilled, you don't understand our explanations.
I don't really agree with this. I do think that users (and to some extent devs) like to trade on this, but I personally got well into the Gentoo experience without really learning any general-purpose Linux skills. The skills are the same you need for any distro, namely how to follow the checklist:
1) Google and search the forum for your prob
2) If you don't find a solution this way, ask in the forum (showing some evidence that you've tried to solve it yourself)
3) If the forum concludes something's broken, file a bug.
The skills are constructing good queries, and polite well-structured requests for help. Innit?
Member since:2006-04-21
gentoo is surely not for non-geeks. If you don't know what you are doing, you shouldn't be using gentoo. It'll never work out. Certain technical skills are a requirement. It's no good if you are so unskilled, you don't understand our explanations.
I don't really agree with this. I do think that users (and to some extent devs) like to trade on this, but I personally got well into the Gentoo experience without really learning any general-purpose Linux skills. The skills are the same you need for any distro, namely how to follow the checklist:
I agree entirely (with the second poster). I DO think that there are a select bunch of people who are Gentooers, but I think that's true of any distro...It would be true for various distros of Windows and the Mac, too, if they had an open source development model...However, I don't think that that select group is necessarily geeks...I know several geeks who are way geekier than I am, who wouldn't even touch Gentoo w/ a bargepole...some because they have tried Gentoo and hated it, some not.
Member since:
2005-10-02
One has to be extremely stupid in order to receive such a reply. Like not knowing how to turn on a computer.
gentoo is surely not for non-geeks. If you don't know what you are doing, you shouldn't be using gentoo. It'll never work out. Certain technical skills are a requirement. It's no good if you are so unskilled, you don't understand our explanations.
That said, I've never had any problems with getting help. People at the gentoo-user mailling list are always very kind and helpful - unless of course you refuse to read the documentation we are pointing you to (or are a jerk posting spam about dolphins getting killed in Japan - that was one more person to my kill-list).
If you don't understand the documentation you are free to ask for our help and we will gladly help you.