Switching to Gentoo
 

Hi im planning on using Gentoo is this a good distro?

Yes Gentoo is a good distribution.

All distros are good for someone, else they would cease to exist, in the end it comes down to what you're expecting fro one.
For me, Gentoo gives me the flexibility to install only what I want/need (USE flags) and everything is installed optimized for my PC. Which means no system bloating with unused libraries and possibly some performance gain; this is what I expect from a good distro.

Serafean

@SBN, what kind of box do you have, because with Gentoo, you need to compile your programs.

Yes, but gentoo is excellent on old hardware too. The distribution is after all named after the fastest kind of penguins...

My 1.2 GHz AMD Athlon machine is very responsive these days. I run XFCE4 window manager and use e.g. Abiword instead of openoffice.

It is of course an advantage to have a machine you can leave on overnight for the compiles. With older hardware it takes time to compile it all, but when its done its very fast.

Mons

To the original poster: you will need to supply more information if you truly want an useful response from us. "Good" can be lots of things.




Which eases the spreading of a misconception: Gentoo is not noticeably any faster than any other Linux that's compiled for your architecture. It's all linux, there's nothing magical in that or this distro nor the other. And on aged hardware the time needed to compile everything surpasses by far the gain that you could gain from a 1ms faster execution time in any case.

The true power of Gentoo is in customization, being USE flags one of the main strengths for me. With a simple combination of use flags you can make mplayer to have 100 or 2 dependencies. That's true power. All of that with proper dependency resolution and without having to deal with configure scripts.

You can always do distributed compilation, use ccache or just compile on a faster machine, though. :)

Its definately true that we mean different things when we say "good".

On a different machine I moved from fedora to gentoo. Fedora at least is not compiled specifically for my architecture. I was using the 3D desktop and it was very sluggish on that hardware with fedora. With gentoo it was smooth as silk. It being easier and more geard towards customisation also make it easier to avoid things that slow down the system, but at least in my experience compiling for your architecture is noticable.

I do like the customisation, but my main benfit of gentoo is speed.

Another thing I like is the lack of conventional releases. You use USE flags and other settings to decide what you want and how up to date you want your system. So when a new release comes around for a component, e.g. Gnome 2.26, you can update to it early if you like, and risk a bit of unstability or wait longer. Its up to you and much easier than upgrading to a new release of the distro itself as with most distros (at least I always had trouble with upgrading on other distros I have tried).

So SBN, what sort of hardware do you have? I also hope you don't mind the command line (the terminal)...

Mons

Hey thanks for the replies guys.

Im just curious about Gentoo because my co-worker said that its customizable, which is what i want in a box.

Now i just want to get some inputs regarding the benefits of Gentoo its good side and bad side and how does it stand over the other popular distros.

Also can Gentoo be used in servers.

For my box its an old 1.2gz AMD Athlon.

Gentoo can be used in servers : select correct USE flags, install packages, configure security (SELinux...) and off you go...

As for your box, I run Gentoo on an old box like this, and my first mistake was to not select USE flags aggresively enough and not selecting lightweight packages, and had to wait for two days to at least get a basic system running/perform a monthly upgrade for a box that was a bit overwhelmed by what I wanted from it. After selecting correct USE flags and changing some packages, the entire system recompiles under two days and the box is very usable.

This is something that you won't fully understand until you try it. And it's different for each person. You might try it and find that the bad things outweight the good ones or the opposite.

For me the good is customizability, the bad is compiling times, but that is to be expected and is not a big problem for me.

I don't think it's comparable to any of the big distros in any way. All the big distros are based on binary packages and they need to do releases and reinstall from time to time. I've had the same base OS for years and only reinstalled it when migrating from k7 to 64 bits.

Gentoo has profiles that are suitable for servers, and also has hardened profiles which deal with all the selinux/pax stuff for you. Gentoo has an advantage over other distros for a server: the fact that you can compile only the strictly needed functionalities. That means less dependencies and less code, which in turn means less possible vulnerabilities. You can update only the packages strictly required by the GLSA security advisories, that will shorten the time of updates and will only update if strictly needed for security reasons, which is a good thing on a server.

Of course this all comes to a cost, a system is only as secure as knowledgeable is its administrator.

I don't know your background, but a lot of peoples compare Gentoo as the FreeBSD Linux version.

There a lot of things that you can compare between FreeBSD and Gentoo.

Look at the portage tree, it's almost the same as the ports on FreeBSD, I mean the category inside /usr/ports vs /usr/portage.

For the rest, Gentoo is a rolling release, so you don't need to reinstall your box every 6 months :P

Hello.

Is being similar to FreeBSD a good thing?

No. It's only a fact. :p

Seriously, that entirely depends on who do you ask to.

Is a hammer any good? The answer is that hammers have no morality, they aren't good or bad. It depends on the task that you have between hands. It certainly is not the best to cut wires, but it's the absolute number 1 when all you want is to smash something into a wall, even if that "something" is your own finger sometimes hehe.

Gentoo is customizable. Is customizability a good thing? Well, if you want to tailor every single piece of the system -starting from the very core- with your own hands then it's the best OS around the world. If you want a click'n'run system then Gentoo is very bad.

If that ["The answer is that hammers have no morality, they aren't good or bad."] is the answer then it was either a ridiculous question or the person responding misunderstood. I would've figured "Is a hammer any good?" actually means: "Does a hammer have any use?" [I believe dictionary.reference.com supports me in this]. The answer: "yes".

I suppose you were trying to make an analogy between the hammer and "gentoo is similar to freebsd" [a poor analogy indeed, in my opinion].

It is difficult to find a proper response to your last paragraph [I will not enumerate the reasons]. Gentoo is customizable, but so are many others. I don't see anything 'bad' about that particular aspect. I can't agree to Gentoo being "the best <anything>" - this is obviously your opinion. These are the Gentoo subforums, so I will not say things such as: what about Linux From Scratch, Lunar Linux, SourceMage GNU/Linux, etc.

In any case, I asked "Is being similar to FreeBSD a good thing?" because d2_racing had made the comparison between Gentoo and FreeBSD - I was trying to find out his opinion.

I might even agree that my response was generic and fuzzy, but so was the question in first place. You wouldn't expect a concrete answer to that kind of question either, would you?

My response didn't imply the opposite, sorry if I wasn't clear enough. "A is customizable" doesn't imply "B is not customizable", or "A is the only customizable distribution".

I know that there are lots of ways to achieve the same things that Gentoo does. I just find it the most convenient one (you are right that's just a personal opinion), but I wouldn't even dare to imply that it's the best for everyone in the planet.

I you want his opinion, then he is the one to answer the question, still I don't understand the question at all. I am not trying to argue here or something, really, it's just that I can't understand the question probably. That the two OSes has something in common is not good or bad by nature (just like the hammer) again: it depends on your needs.

Maybe you were expecting to know about the similarities between both of them. In my opinion, there's the fact that ebuilds are similar to ports (which again is not good or bad, it's simply a fact). For me, the similarities between Gentoo and FreeBSD almost end there, except for a few other details.

The OS is different, and the whole concept of BSD systems is completely different when compared to a linux system, starting from the kernel and the toolchain and how these two core components interrelate.

For me, portage being based in ports is a good thing, for others it's horrid.