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I know it's fashionable to have a dig at Gentoo users and ricers, but when you look at Gentoo, what's wrong with it?

I used Gentoo often for some servers about three or four years ago, and they were great. Mostly I just used all the stable packages in x86, occasionally I had to go ~x86, but things were pretty easy to work out. I also remember when we used the old Linux threading model, and I can remember upgrading one server to NPTL with nothing happening apart from having to re-emerge Postfix - and it was still running fine. I can't think of too many other distributions that can do that. None, in fact.

Gentoo is also great if you want to keep most of the rest of your system stable, whilst being able to upgrade easily to newer piece of software. Upgrading Ruby and Rails is a case in point, and if you want to do this on a binary distribution then you'll have to either be lucky enough to find a repository or you'll have to compile it yourself. You're then going to have to hope that it doesn't pull in a ton of other upgraded packages you don't need either.

When I moved from Gentoo to Red Hat/CentOS and other binary distributions of the same type, I found this out. I also found this out when I installed Red Hat/CentOS for the first time. I did a default server-only install, and was absolutely befuddled that my /usr partition was chock-full of pointless dependencies and complete crap. I mean, I don't mind the odd dependency here and there, and you find out some of them are useful, but we had dbus -> Pango -> Cairo etc. Dbus I can just about understand, but what the hell is Pango and Cairo doing on a non-GUI server system?!

Things have come to such a head, I'm now considering Gentoo again.

Edited 2007-12-17 15:09