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If you really want to know how your linux system runs, use slackware or LFS.

Any package management immediately adds a layer of complexity and that means less control.

"If you really want to know how your Linux system runs, use slackware or LFS."

I'd love you to clarify the answer, and am surprised that slackware users don't use swaret. Although I'm not even sure why Slackware is even relevant. I'm not sure people learn GNU this way. The *only* thing I can think of is using commands they wouldn't always.

The only thing you *could* say as regards the silly comment about Slackware is that you have to learn how portage works, but then thats what makes Gentoo the easy to manage meta-distribution it is.

The package-management on Gentoo. If you are familiar with it, is to provide a balance between ease of maintenance vs micro-management which it does well. If there was a *better* way. I would use it.

I suspect your post is some kind of Distro smackdown comment, but I'd love to hear what you mean, as Slackware was my choice of Distribution, before Gentoo.

I'm actually giving your post more credence than your post deserves.

I would argue that LFS/slackware/Gentoo are not about leaning GNU. Although because of the time to set-up you learn something from help files, compiling, customizing , tailoring etc etc, but very little else. Gentoo is not an education tool. In reality the strength of Gentoo relies on some familiarity with the programs available to GNU to start with.

I'm confused by the term control. If control is downloading, and installing a program. Then you have a radically different version of control than me, windows users routinely do that.

Gentoo offers more control;customization...and *maintainability* in a meta-distribution. I suggest you look up use flags.

Slackware has and always was about *stability*...and nothing else, and does so exceptionally well, but this is at the cost of *any* optomisation not cutting edge, not as customizable, greater maintenance...but then thats not the point of Slackware, and I would be arrogant to suggest that I could set up a binary distribution as stable as Patrick Volkerding

LSF does offer you true customization...but at the heavy price of maintenance which is the main advantage of Gentoo.

I've posted really badly, I actually should be making these points.

1) There are different Distributions, because there are different *needs*, my need is I like to choose my applications. I want cutting-edge, package-management, stability, fun and Gentoo offers me this...at the cost of compile times.

2) Package-management is the *killer-application* of GNU simply because maintenance for *users* is so incredibly easy.

On reflection I should just have modded you down for being off topic.

Edited 2007-07-24 05:51

Oh man, and I warned you about this. OK then, let's see some facts and figures. Prove to me that a Gentoo system prepared in a certain way is more "stable" than one using distribution X, and/or give some figures about how much faster it is. And I'd like the figures to be based on a broad range of similarly configured installations, to make for relevant statistics (as opposed to your gut feeling). Oh, and it would help if you could demonstrate exactly how the fact that you chose your own compile flags impacted on the speed and stability, more than the impact of distro-specific dependencies or the quality of the original code of all the software packages.



Dude. If you want to really learn how a Linux distro is put together, build a Linux From Scratch installation. Where you have to understand the architecture, manually compile everything (and I mean manually, not editing a flag file and issuing a couple of emerge commands), which includes inferring dependencies yourself and making decisions about the final system. You have not compiled shit until you've compiled strange stuff that doesn't even use automake, until you've compiled yourself a weird beast like the old XFree, or prepared an entire Gnome ecosystem and allowed 1.x to coexist with 2.x peacefully. 'Cause stuff like that is what separates the distro maintainer from the emerge user.

Being told what -O2 does and staring at passing screens of compilation stuff does NOT teach you Linux.



OK, what am I looking at here? Because apart from Portage I don't see anything out of the ordinary. OK, it was the first distro to go 64bit, as I'm sure there are plenty things that other distro's pioneered. They contributed stuff to the gcc, good, many contributors to other distro's do that all the time. It's portable, lovely, it's Linux, of course it's portable. The init replacement is a nice thing, not that replacing SysV init hasn't been dealt with or at least thought about by any other distro around.

I repeat: where's the special stuff? Where's the magic? Why should a developer put his time and effort into furthering Gentoo? What does a user get that's so special?

Edited 2007-07-24 09:11

Customization, baby! Gentoo is what you want it to be. It's that simple. You can make a rock-solid distribution using nothing but very stable packages, or you can live dangerously and use brand new packages - you can even write your own ebuilds if the packages you want aren't available or don't allow for the kind of customization you want. I maintain my own set of ebuilds for several gnome-packages because the official ebuilds lack options.

Of course, I'm an old LFS'er, so my view is that Gentoo is LFS on Steroids - good for daily work due to lower maintainence. You can learn quite a bit from installing and using Gentoo - it depends on how you use it and how you install it. I learned a lot from LFS and I've learned a lot from Gentoo (though most from LFS). However, most Gentoo users are using Gentoo because of the option of the infinite range of customization. And that's what Gentoo is about. No other distribution make it so easy. LFS allows for more low-level work but at the cost of easy maintainence. The binary distributions do not allow for customization though Arch Linux (or Slackware) might be good alternatives. So far I'm sticking with Gentoo though I'm keeping an eye on Arch Linux.