The death of gentoo?
Not really, but a quote from gentoo.org:
Consequently, we're canceling the 2008.1 release. The release engineering team has to reconsider its priorities—we overstretched our human resources during the prolonged 2008.0 release process. This caused too much stress for our release engineers and multiple postponements of the release.
They're going 'back to basics'. I'm not sure that means.. Pre-ubuntu, I thought this would be the distro of choice for CS. I've never really cared for much ubuntu. Why? It's too easy. :)
95% of what I know about linux guts (bootstrapping, kernel tweaking, pre-linking, etc.) comes from gentoo. I wonder if anyone is doing this with ubuntu.
Though I do agree with the adage (specifically to gentoo): "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing..."
(end of troll).
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Gentoo has been on a
Gentoo has been on a slippery slope for the last few months now. Inter-dev team arguments, public attacks from high ranking Gentoo devs, etc.
I've done a couple Stage 3 installs and one Stage 1 install (Which took almost 48 hours) so I can appreciate the customization that Gentoo offers but after trying our something like Arch Linux, I much prefer that to Gentoo.
To be honest, I found almost no benefit on a modern computer from compiling everything from source and playing around with USE flags. On older, less powerful systems, perhaps, but 1 extra second means very little to me when I have to deal with breakage, and the other problems that arise from dealing with Gentoo and being on the cutting edge.
I found a real pleasure in Debian Testing. I've always been a fan of Debian and after using Kubuntu for a couple years, I went back to neutral Debian, where Gnome isn't loved more than KDE, which isn't loved more than XFCE, etc. I have a relatively cutting edge system (cutting edge but not experimental) and DPKG/APT is extremely sexy (portage is pretty hawt too).
*shrug*
My jaunt with Gentoo was
My jaunt with Gentoo was about 2 years ago (2006.1 release). I was using it for a headless file server, doing EVMS on top of RAID + MythTV. At first, it was really good. But, over time, portage kept being really painful to upgrade. Eventually the distro changed something which completely broke EVMS, so I was unable to boot. I switched to Ubuntu (and later to plain LVM), and haven't looked back. Simply put, though my stability requirements aren't that high, but even for me Gentoo was completely unusable.
If you want to use something like Gentoo that works, take a look at FreeBSD. All of the benefits of portage (and compiler optimizations), but on a system that is completely stable. I'd really hoped that Gentoo would become like FreeBSD but with a Linux kernel, but that's not the case in any way.
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Andrew
interesting opinions. I had
interesting opinions. I had been a gentoo user since just after its public release, but gave up not long after my Mac switch. I never really believed in Gentoo as a server OS, we used to use FreeBSD for just that...
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John Douglas Carter, MSc
Dept. of Computing & Information Studies
PhD Student, University of Guelph