Is gentoo worthy?
 

Hi, my first post :)
Well, I am trying to pick a linux distro, and i have research, talked to people and i found great contradictions when it comes to gentoo.
Some people say is excellent, other that is awfull, but they agree that is a headahe to configure it.
So, i wanted to ask you guys your opinion, is it worthy all the effort to install gentoo, or you woukd go for the trusty debian?

Thanks!!

If you are new to Linux, then Gentoo is (IMHO) NOT the place to start.

You can not go wrong with anything in the top 5-10 in the "hit list" at http://distrowatch.com

Isn't everybody (at least that's how it looks at times)? It would help a little if you said more about your objectives and experience. However, if you want something to just work, pick an 'easy to use' distro and forget gentoo for the moment.

It is a different matter if your feeling is 'I don't mind the short term pain, I want to get to know the internals of the OS'. Or, 'I need (for some reason) to fine tune everything to the ultimate for my installation' (not that I think that necessarily helps in any noticeable way, except for certain corner cases).

That's the way it is with opinions. And strong opinions in particular. So, what you've done is ask for more of them. I'm not really clear that will help you.

If you're not looking for an instant Windows/Mac OS X/whatever replacement and you simply want to have fun and learn a thing or two in the process - Gentoo is perfect. The handbook is very well written and just won't let you go wrong if you keep doing whatever it tells you to do.

However.. the installation process itself is probably nothing like what you've seen before - in Gentoo YOU are the installer, there's no software (like Fedora's Anaconda) that will guide you through all the hassle. You have to know what you're doing. Or blindly follow the handbook.

I ran Gentoo for a year or so (this was a few years ago). A lot of the optimization stuff is hype IMO ... if you have a machine old enough to show a discernable speed difference between the CPU flags (that is, if you don't do something crazy and create an unstable system) then you probably don't want to push the hardware by compiling everything all the time, and it will be slow to do so. So where's the gain?

Likewise, what's the advantage to paring options out of apps, saving a few K here and there and often leaving out something you actually want? On a modern machine, disk space is ridiculously cheap: I have 820GB of disk space on my current main machine. Even being forced to think about saving a few K or a meg here and there is an absurd waste of time.

In sum, there's nothing wrong with Gentoo if you want a hobby distro to tinker with. It is tinkering heaven. However, much of what you might learn with Gentoo is not useful for other distros. My advice is to learn the distro you want to use over the long term, and unless you are sure that compiling everything all the time will not get old for you, then this will likely not be Gentoo or any other source-based distro.

But did I like Gentoo while I was using it? Sure. Would I recommend it for the average newbie? Surely not.

Gentoo is the best place to start if you really want to know the nuts and bolt of a linux system. If you want easy and don't want to learn then go with any other distro. Gentoo builds to your system and your wishes. It usually results in the fastest if set correctly.

Only the untrained would suggest gentoo is awful or not worthy. It is time consuming and difficult maybe but does not lack for quality and technical correctness.

I'm not sure what the fans of slackware and LFS would say to that...

There are certainly those who are 'trained' (why is that a useful concept; not comptent, experienced, knowledgable or skillful, but trained) who would suggest that Gentoo is awful, but maybe they are wrong. A more interesting accusation seems to be that the time spent on learning gentoo could be better spent on other things; only an individual can answer for themselves whether spending time learning the fundamentals seems to them a worthwhile use of their time.

Another objection is that there are more effective ways of investing your time to get that result.

For me, if someone else is going to put the time in to make sure that something 'just works', I'm happy with that. Where I don't like that is the tendency for these 'automagic' things to get in the way, and, in that case, given that the choices are to whinge or to fix it, spending the time on fixing it seems worthwhile.

There is some halfway house:Arch Linux (www.archlinux.org)

WHY? The replies here would make you more confused.

Why not multiboot your harddisk and try things for yourself? I've mutlibooted my system with Arch, CentOS, Debian, Fedora11, Gentoo, Mandriva 2009 Spring, Slackware and Ubuntu. Over the time I've started to like Arch and Gentoo (may be in that order). I'm using Arch as a production system, practically for every day to day task. Gentoo comes next. As a company's add goes, 'I'm loving it'.

IMHO, that's how you should make a decision about a distro.

Edit: Before somebody mentions it, let me confess. I don't have a lot of time but in my eagerness to learn linux I make time for such experimentation.

Best thing I ever did was jump from Redhat to gentoo. Great community, the best doco, got me comfortable with meandering through the kernel source ...

Somewhat in agreement with comments above though, I rarely use it these days.

The strongest points of Gentoo, in my opinion, are these:

• Community, very knowledgeable and big enough, high traffic forums at forums.gentoo.org, and active enough mailing lists
• The most complete documentation, not perfect, but the best I've seen, even ahead of this from LFS
• There's nothing that LFS can do that Gentoo can't, you basically can control how packages are compiled down to compiler flags and configure options, but unlike LFS, this is all dependency-aware, so you don't have to go fishing packages all around to solve the dependencies yourself. USE flags are the key here. You don't have to be looking at the compile output either to see if something has been disabled cause of a missing dependency. At least in Gentoo, even if you have to compile, the process can be unattended for the most part. When a merge ends, all the important bits of the output are collected and shown at the end so you can see if everything went wrong.

There's the mythical speech about it being faster because it's compiled to suit your hardware. That's mostly a legend, except as someone said above, for some very special corner cases. For me, use flags are far more important. For example, these are what will decide if your mplayer binary will have 10 or 10 thousand dependencies. This is not only a matter of resources or disk space as someone said above. That's not the question, the question is that more dependencies equals to bigger loading times, takes more ram and cpu, and there's the fact that more code means more vulnerabilities and bugs.

If you only compile the strictly needed features in php then an attacker will have a more limited set of vulnerabilities or bugs to attack our box, this is a very convenient feature in servers.

Gentoo ask from you some will to learn, and you will enjoy it if you are the kind of persons that do not matter reading manuals when needed. Otherwise, if you want things just to work and your only reason to try gentoo is that you expect it to turn your box into a racing machine, then don't do it. You'd be wasting your time.

I disagree that Gentoo is only a hobbyist toolbox. It has enough tools to be able to serve for production purposes, and in certain cases it's probably the best option. It has hardened profiles and the stable branch is as stable as this of any other popular server oriented distro. In a server you can just make security updates and nothing else (there's the glsa tools for that). Of course you need to know how to use it. At the end of the day, there's no distro that's *the best*. it all comes at what do you know better.

A good thing about Gentoo is that due to its nature and the kind of community it has, it offers probably the best non-paid technical support you are going to get ever (not that paid support equals to quality support always either...).

I so far have steered clear of Gentoo, but have used LFS for a couple of years and now in EasyLFS have my own distro that's compiled from source. I don't actually use it on my boxes though, these are all run by Fedora 11.
I like tinkering around though, which is the reason why I keep my project alive. It actually started out because I liked LFS as my system, but didn't want to go through all the work in case I need/want to re-install the system.

Btw, what I like to test other distros/OSs, and for the development of EasyLFS, is virtualization. My day-to-day OS is, as said, Fedora. Everything else sleeps inside image-files in order to be booted inside a window whenever I like.
That way I can use my complete disk for Fedora, and whatever space I have available I can use to create disk-images for virtual machines. I find this way much better than leaving disk-space unpartitioned in case I want to try another distro. Also I can try another distro while still using my main system for other stuff.

maybe
 

I guess the point is what you really want - if you wish to USE Linux (as a desktop operating system) or if you wish to LEARN about Linux (as a general purpose OS with multiple, often conflicting, choices...).

By myself, after a few years with SuSE, a year or so with Debian, I passed a copuple of years with Gentoo - great choice. But, at last, I did not want to continually micro-manage my notebook, so moved to Fedora.

One thing I like about Gentoo is that, as the Gentoo's about says (http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml), its a metadistro, meaning that you can give your system the face you want. When you finish building it, your system will be unique and completely yours. At this point you like it so much that you feel you'll never need to re-install.

I moved to gentoo when I tried to install evince in Debian, and it pulled out as dependency almost 200 gnome packages (including gnome destkop itself). I got angry with that :)

If you want to build your system from scratch (as LFS but with dependency-awareness), and if you have time and a little bit of patience (or a powerful machine that can compile things fast), its a good distro to try.

Also, Gentoo's package tree is handled in a very powerful manner, It's easy to install 'unstable' packages while in 'stable' context, and portage - the package manager - is very powerful and flexible, it is easy to extend with your own (or contributed) packages.

I feel very confortable with it, Gentoo gives me a lot of control about the packages and how they are installed.

But, anyway, you should try yourself and see if you like it. These opinions won't give you much more than is already on the net.

A, let's say, "normal" linux evolution chain would be something like.

*buntu/suse/mandriva --> fedora/debian/ --> arch --> gentoo --> slackware --> lfs

this in terms of you, getting into experience trials related to how much difficulty you will have getting an end-system to work properly as you like.

In term of learning in overall, in any distribution you can learn everything of linux, you just have to want to learn.