
Why I Still Choose Gentoo - rohshall
http://emergelinux.tumblr.com/post/17799928317/why-i-still-choose-gentoo
======
simonsarris
Choice of menial things (author's words), "flexibility" of having only what
you need. Touting a shorter compile time as a benefit against binary packages.
Good stats on an old machine.

These all seem downright _odd_ as benefits.

> Finally, the control over your kernel configuration is a huge selling point

WHY? Why is this a huge selling point? Why would I, the OS user, care if the
kernel is tiny and tailored? What does it _materially_ change when I use the
computer?

I guess my reasons for picking an OS are just too different. I prefer
something that lets me do all the things I sat down at a computer to do.
Ideally, _I wouldn 't even know what OS I was using._

I don't mean to demean the users of Gentoo. Especially if there's a joy to it
- if you enjoy configuring kernel-level stuff, distribution hacking - that's
great. All that power to you, and Gentoo looks like a good fit. But defending
it with these kinds of points just seems tired and strange.

~~~
mberning
Pretty much the reason I stopped using FreeBSD as my desktop os and got an OSX
machine. Nothing against the DIYers out there, but the vast majority of people
have other things they would rather spend their precious time on.

~~~
dmix
I recently did the inverse: OSX to Arch Linux.

My motivation was very much similar to why I switched from Textmate to VIM. I
hit a wall in terms of how powerful and efficient I could be with Textmate.
Wheras I knew I could become equally productive in VIM within a few months and
in return I would have a seemingly endless opportunity to improve my toolset
in the future.

The majority of people need optimized prepackaged software - agreed - but for
someone who has spent the majority of their life on a computer, via hobby and
now work, the context has shifted from "I just need it to work" to making a
long-term investment in my tools to maximize productivity and enjoyment of the
time spent on the machine.

~~~
rfnslyr
Can you expand on your Textmate efficiency? I'm new to OS X and it's tools,
currently on Sublime Text 2 but haven't really configured it at all.

I want to hear all of it!

Thanks.

~~~
AYBABTME
I'd suggest that you try not to jump in the 'configuration band wagon' and
first try to learn the very basics of Sublime Text. Also look for v3, which is
neat.

Sublime Text 3 is a great editor on its own, and while I do have packages and
plugins installed, I believe new users should take the time to familiarize
themselves with the editor before bloathing it with whatever X blog post says.

As to ST vs VIM, I used to use Vim, I still use it everyday. ST has a much
nicer GUI than MacVim or GVim... and the stuff I used to do in Vim, I can do
just as well in ST with Vi-mode.

Now if only ST3 was not proprietary software.

~~~
pimeys
I'm a long time VIM user and I jumped into the Sublime wagon for a day. And I
realized that Sublimes VIM mode was not at all enough, just a shadow of the
real thing. To this day, only thing that comes really really close is Emacs
with evil mode.

For me, the more I use computers for work, the more stuff I build, GUIs start
to be too much in my way. I just need to learn the editor keys and window
manager keys to the spine. I don't want nags from my OS to update something,
some windows to float wherever they decided this time or some weird services
running which I don't know they exist.

Total control on what you own. That seems to be my goal as I get older and
more proficient.

~~~
AYBABTME
What follows is not a critique of Vim - I use Vim just as much as I use
Sublime nowaday, if not more. I'm just stating why I found a case for Sublime.

* * *

I'm not implying that Vim mode is the same as Vim, it's not, not at all. But
function-wise, I find most of what _I need_ right back into ST.

Also, Vim doesn't quite have multi-cursor the way ST has it. I'm sure Vim has
a plugin that does it, but then you have to install it manually or with
Pathogen or Vundle - Sublime's Package Manager works way better in that case.

The reason I favor a GUI over Vim's terminalish interface is that in Vim,
everything has the same height and width: a char size. In Sublime, I can set
my desktop manager to draw menus and stuff in super small points and keep the
font of my code in a bigger point. The separator between two editor windows
doesn't occupy a whole character width for itself. The status bar at the
bottom as well. The autocompletion feature doesn't occupy an arbitrary
character-sized space.

Fuzzy search in Sublime is great. ST3 comes with `Goto Definition` which works
great too, especially when you tell Sublime what you consider being your
project.

It's configurable in Python and JSON, which I find to be more readable than
Vimscript and Elisp.

Its fancy design calms my need for artistic beauty, as non-hacker as this
might sound. I like that it looks great.

Finally, I write a lot of Go and GoSublime is just a killer plugin.

~~~
pimeys
I've used multiple cursors with Emacs and Vim. It's really nice, but I kind of
still don't need that feature.

For beauty, I really love my Solarized desktop. It's functional, the colours
are nice and I know exactly where is my editor, my browser and my test
terminals.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/b99hli11lklmf00/desktop.png](https://www.dropbox.com/s/b99hli11lklmf00/desktop.png)

So, coming from the Mac OS X world, I started to see the real beauty of my
engineering desktop. And of course all the configs are in Github.

~~~
rfnslyr
Link the Github! Link doesn't work for me. SSL connection error.

~~~
pimeys
[https://github.com/pimeys/dotfiles/tree/work](https://github.com/pimeys/dotfiles/tree/work)

[https://github.com/pimeys/dotvim](https://github.com/pimeys/dotvim)

------
nullc
The purpose of running a distribution— any distribution— is to outsource a
bunch of basic work that all systems need. After all, I could do all that
stuff myself just from source, but I'd like to get something _else_ done with
my life too.

The problem with Gentoo is that it just doesn't have an active enough
development community to keep up with that task in the way that Fedora,
Ubuntu, Debian, or even arch can... so you're stuck doing a lot of stuff
yourself, or using old software that you wouldn't be otherwise. Important bug
fixes get left marked unstable forever, etc.

I think this is really unfortunate because Gentoo does better capture the
inherent advantages in running an open source operating system.

As an upstream developer, I've found that Gentoo users seem to pretty much the
only GNU/Linux users who send _patches_ with their bug reports— even more so
than the _packagers_ of other distributions. It's especially remarkable when
you consider how many more users these other systems have. I don't believe
that it's just because Gentoo attracts the geekiest of the geeky, it's because
the distribution inherently gives all the users the tools to contribute back
and makes them take some of the startup costs, empowering them to contribute.

I wish all distributions were more like gentoo. Innovations in other areas are
also important, but there is something to be said about recognizing what makes
your system uniquely good and maximizing it— rather than imitating the
competitions' strengths... in contrast to what I see with the major distros
copying MSFT's and Apple's Signed-everything secureboot stuff, and their
bondage and discipline tablet oriented UIs.

~~~
eldondev
I think this is pretty perceptive. I wish that there were more active
development for the portage tree community, but the truth is, there is just so
much _there_, and as I see it, gentoo hasn't been commodified by an enterprise
(canonical, red hat, etc), which is both a blessing and a curse. Also, I think
nobody really runs "stable" gentoo, because stable things on single systems
are naive. This is part of the reason for the explosion of distributed systems
(cassandra, hadoop, hbase, etc). I think most people who run gentoo
(correctly) don't actually rely on one single system being stable.

------
tater
I can't tell if this is satire or not, it's almost as if I'm reading
[http://funroll-loops.info/](http://funroll-loops.info/)

~~~
meepmorp
Thanks; I just wasted 1/2 hour reading through that site and groaning.

------
silentmars
I used gentoo for many years. I have come to view this as something of an
abusive relationship. Now I'm a happy arch user, and no longer think of
interactions with the package manager with a sense of dread!

Also, the article had some fantastic (unintentional?) references to
[http://funroll-loops.info/](http://funroll-loops.info/)

~~~
qu4z-2
That's interesting. I dread arguing with any non-portage (that is, non-Gentoo)
package manager. Maybe that's just 'cause I'm used to portage though.

~~~
na85
yum actually works really well

------
parfe
I have 8GB of ram. I stopped caring about my OS footprint a long time ago. I
sometimes forget VMs running on my workstation and never notice. My system
resources are essentially limitless; my time is not.

I used Gentoo for a while thinking I cared about the system logger or cron. I
don't. 99.9% of stuff can be installed with the default settings. Painting an
actual racing stripe on my workstation would be a more efficient use of my
time compared to the cost and any mythical benefits installing Gentoo
provides.

------
farslan
It's interesting that so many people have time to maintain their OS, fixing
the problems with that OS and still continue to spend time on Work, Family and
co. Is that really necessary when you could use a more simpler OS and
therefore could have more time to spend on other useful stuffs?

~~~
jiggy2011
If you're somewhat familiar with Linux the time investment isn't really that
bad. I've wasted more time over the years due to weird Windows quirks than I
have configuring Gentoo.

~~~
qu4z-2
This is my impression too. Every now and then I run emerge --sync && emerge
-avDNu world, do a quick sanity check, then leave it alone.

I've spent enough time on other linux distros chasing down PPAs, or trying to
diagnose weird issues that it refuses to log because it might intimidate the
user.

------
zhemao
It seems like the author's main point is that Gentoo's source-based package
management offers more fine-grained control than Arch's binary package
management.

To this I say: Arch has source-based package management too! It's called
makepkg, and is indispensable for long-time Arch users, as it allows you to
build packages not in the official repos, or tweak the build flags of official
packages.

As always, the Arch wiki has extensive documentation.

* Here are docs on makepkg [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg)

* Here are docs on installing unofficial packages from the Arch User Repository [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/AUR)

* Here are instructions on installing custom versions of official packages from source using ABS ([https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ABS))

------
contingencies
Sure, Gentoo is fantastic for the control it gives you ... by making extreme
flexibility relatively convenient, you get various benefits such as resource
gains and additional security through minimalism. It's not for everyone, but
it's an _extremely_ valuable member of the Linux distribution space.

However, I disagree with the author suggesting Gentoo is anything near Linux
from Scratch (LFS). A base 'stage3' (initial filesystem) image for Gentoo is
quite large these days (~170MB compressed) and includes python, perl, bash,
etc. (Squashfs with busybox and a kernel is a base Linux system!)

Like any project, Gentoo's not perfect and has its issues. While I personally
prefer it to others, I also see the value in other systems for people with
different goals (such as reasonably automated security updates, strong
commercial support, etc.). As always, right tool for the job.

------
javert
He's only listed three advantages that I can discern.

1\. "but users of binary package management still install extra support for
things they may never use."

2\. Custom kernel with only what you need

3\. "Even menial things such as choice of system logger and cron daemon can be
chosen and configured exactly the way you want"

Why are those meaningful advantages? For example, if it makes my computer run
faster, great, but does it? (I doubt it.)

Most of the other stuff is just giving major props to Portage... I mean yeah,
I'm sure the "revdep-rebuild function" is great, but since I'm using a binary
distro, I don't need it!

~~~
H3g3m0n
I don't see why number 2 can't be done on any other distro. Nothing is
stopping you from compiling your own kernel on any of them. Of coarse its rare
that people would bother.

3 is also a feature of Arch. The problem is now you have to spend time setting
that stuff up. More problematic is you have to actually know you need to set
something up. Did you remember/bother to tweak, your ssd settings in fstab?
Setup OpenAL for 3d sound? Your HDD IO schedular? Your TCP buffer settings?
Your font renderers antialiasing? All that crap sould be taken care of
(although admitidly distros don't seem to do things like setup SSD schedulers
to deadline/nop.

1 seems a be redonculious. There is very little reason to really worry about
having a few extra packages lying around as long as there not running stuff in
the background. I think it's more for people with a case of OCD about their
file system.

~~~
javert
> Did you remember/bother to tweak, your ssd settings in fstab?

I use Arch too, and no, I didn't think to do that. Thanks!

~~~
CasimirCelerity
Instead of mounting your file system with discard, use cron to run the command
"fstrim /path/on/ssd" daily. You won't have to pass the discard commands every
time something is deleted, and instead only have the performance hit once a
day.

------
Jach
I've used Gentoo since 2007ish on three separate machines, installed it on a
couple more I didn't own, and on my own devices have totally broken it a few
times in the earlier years forcing a complete reinstall. (One time I saved it
after I had killed /bin et al. by bootstrapping with busybox...) The feeling
of control and having essentially _everything_ the way I want is seductive and
easy to miss when I work with Windows or any other Linux. And for some reason
fixing the system when it goes wrong gives me a bit of pleasure, which not
many other things do. This year I swapped out my nVidia GTX260 for a Radeon HD
7950, so of course X wouldn't start. It's a simple issue though, about 10-20
minutes later I had graphics again and my dual monitors setup with my vertical
one rotated properly. Huzzah!

Portage is my favorite package manager, but it's not without its problems. I
occasionally get frustrated by dependency conflicts. One thing I think the
submission should have mentioned is the `eix` tool, which is to Portage's
`emerge` as `slocate` is to `find`. It's a much better experience for finding
out what packages are available or a description of a package.

Another feature I like about Gentoo is 'rolling releases'. I don't ever have
to do a dist-upgrade, I just update the packages I want to update when they
have updates. And I'm still happily using gnome2.

Some people are offended by the installation process. I think that's a good
enough litmus-test for whether they would enjoy Gentoo or not.

------
rogerbinns
There two reasons I have up on Gentoo several years. One was a period of very
high drama amongst the developers.

The major one was packages never being marked as stable. There was a file you
could add packages to in order to allow unstable versions, but it just kept
getting longer and longer. If I wanted long term stability, I'd use Debian.
For desktops and workstations, I expect things to be "fresh" where each distro
has their own tastes for fresh, but certainly measured in months. (I switched
to Ubuntu because I knew I'd get fresh Gnome, at a time when there were good
system enhancements like NetworkManager.)

A quick check on [http://packages.gentoo.org](http://packages.gentoo.org)
shows that no version of Gnome 3 appears to be marked stable. For the software
package I am an author of, the most recent version marked stable was released
13 months ago and there have been 10 releases since! LibreOffice does seem to
be an up to date version, as does emacs.

One area when Gentoo shines are the docs - they are very very good. I did try
Arch a while back and ended up in a maze of using the wrong one out of
official and unofficial documentation.

~~~
od2m
I don't want to identify myself but I was one of the first developers for
Gentoo back when it was called Enoch. There was always drama, credit stealing,
back-stabbing et all. Arguably the largest contribution I made to the
distribution (once again not mentioning specifics to identify myself)... the
history of the event was rewritten and I was left out of it entirely.

I got the heck out of there. That being said, the founder Daniel Robbins is a
nice guy and taught me a lot.

~~~
bofussing
Daniel Robbins also left, he has since set up a Gentoo meta-distribution
called Funtoo [http://www.funtoo.org/](http://www.funtoo.org/)

~~~
od2m
I did not know that, thanks.

------
btipling
> " Gentoo also provides some fantastic tools for maintaining your system.
> ‘eselect’, for example, makes it easy to symlink your kernel,"

This whole post could have been sarcasm. I know it isn't, but, this is exactly
what I never ever want from the computer I use for daily tasks. I just want it
to work.

~~~
CasimirCelerity
The kernel symlinking is actually a rather unnecessary eselect module. An
example of a more useful module is switching your system's default python from
2.7 to 3 to 2.6 in one command instead of changing the symlink for the various
python commands.

------
XERQ
I used to be a major Gentoo user for years, but moved production servers over
to FreeBSD because every few weeks commits to the portage tree would break my
servers requiring hours of "massaging" to get packages compiled.

Portage is brilliant, and *BSD would benefit heavily from it, but at the time
it just wasn't production ready. Too bad the GentooBSD project has been dead
in the water for a few years.

I wrote a guide years ago on setting up a Stage 1 install[1], it's heavily out
of date but may provide an insight into how things on the Gentoo side have
changed over the years.

[1]
[http://matt.xerq.net/gentoo_stage1.txt](http://matt.xerq.net/gentoo_stage1.txt)

------
mieses
Gentoo is hard but it pays off in tough situations. The benefit is more about
elegant and efficient customization rather than performance. It's not for most
situations but I am very grateful that it exists and that I took the time to
learn it.

~~~
contingencies
This matches my own experience. For example, I use it for custom diskless
images that run with some fairly specific kernel features and init system
customizations to support from-boot ethernet and switch redundancy via bonding
at the same time as root on NFS (for cluster integrity, ie. split-brain
avoidance, even in the event of system failure within switching fabric). I
would hate to try doing that with mainstream distributions.

------
aroman
I used Gentoo a while ago, and I did enjoy the experience, but found the
culture and system to be a bit mired in old stubborn tradition.

An interesting fork-ish project is Exherbo, which is basically Gentoo but much
lighter (in architecture, not performance really), cleaner (in my opinion) and
modern.

It's not for everyone, but if Gentoo tickled your fancy but you found it a bit
old-feeling, give Exherbo a shot!

[http://www.exherbo.org/](http://www.exherbo.org/)

Full disclosure: I have absolutely no connection with Exherbo or its
maintainers.

~~~
qu4z-2
As another Gentoo alternative, I'd suggest Funtoo which is essentially a set
of patches on top of Gentoo by the original creator.

------
sysresccd
Let's also not forget Gentoo is the basis of the amazing SystemRescueCD
[http://www.sysresccd.org](http://www.sysresccd.org)

~~~
gwu78
Years ago, I once tried to rescue a disk with this and the CD would not boot
the computer... apparently because it needed to access a hard disk to boot.
Perhaps I am not well schooled in the arts of systemrescuecd, but that just
made me laugh. They may have fixed this in the years since, but I lost any
confidence in systemrescuecd.

Instead, I booted with a BSD kernel having an embedded root filesystem and
proceeded to rescue the disk.

This is why I often can't take Gentoo users seriously. Some certainly know
what they're doing (Google built their systems from Gentoo, didn't they?). But
too many others only think they do.

~~~
srl
Replying to this just to let you know that it seems you've been hellbanned -
each of your last three comments is [dead], although none seems offensive or
inappropriate.

~~~
gwu78
Thanks. So what does it mean if you are "hellbanned" but the comments are
neither offensive nor inappropriate?

Is hellbanning automated, or is it the work of human judgment? Perhaps it is a
technical issue that results in [dead] comments?

------
nickporter
Portage is really worth the time it takes to setup Gentoo. Really, it doesn't
take more than a few hours on a server install, and most of it is unattended.

There's also Funtoo ([http://funtoo.org](http://funtoo.org)) out there, which
is maintained by the creator of Gentoo (Daniel Robbins). It has a couple of
neat features like a git-based portage tree, for example.

------
D9u
Many of the reasons which the author mentions as why they chose Gentoo are
precisely the reasons why I choose FreeBSD.

I really like the ports system, and from what I've heard, Portage is based on
the FreeBSD ports system.

------
dmourati
We're talking about a sample size of one computer here right?

------
mardiros
So you have a Core i7 to build the package quick, then, you use it for 1% of
the time.

Sounds great.

