Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

EAD · 2006-06-29 07:21:24

Hii, I have been using ARCH linux for a while, and really enjoy using it :twisted:
It is a neat Distro, with many cool things, but I have heard many people are using Gentoo, and all the Portage system and Falgs system seem very cool to me, also I love compiling by myself every thing.
So, the million dollar question.
Is it worth to make all the time need to learn a new distro and put Gentoo in my system?
:?:

JGC · 2006-06-29 08:13:21

Learning gentoo isn't the trick. Keeping your system compiling is a bigger trick. Though Gentoo looks attractive, the software that is flagged as stable is quite old and the software that is masked is behind on arch most of the times.

I've done gentoo for 3 weeks, after that, I was sick of all the compile hassles it had and switched back to arch. Two weeks after that I became an arch developer...

tomk · 2006-06-29 08:15:14

Are you seriously asking that question here, in the Arch Discussion forum? I think you'd get better answers in a more neutral place - linuxquestions.org, maybe, or somewhere like that.

EAD · 2006-06-29 08:41:06

tomk wrote:

Are you seriously asking that question here, in the Arch Discussion forum? I think you'd get better answers in a more neutral place - linuxquestions.org, maybe, or somewhere like that.

I am asking here because I am a ARCH user, I love this distro and want to get an opinion.

Borosai · 2006-06-29 08:46:32

The first distro that I actually used for more than a few days was Gentoo, and at first those features you mentioned may seem interesting, but they get old real fast. It's just not practical to compile everything you want to install. And like JGC mentioned, many packages marked stable are out of date...it seems they have too many packages and not enough maintainers.

With Arch (as far as I can tell), you get everything you get with Gentoo, but much quicker. There really is no advantage to using it unless you want to spend your days compiling and messing around with your compile options and use flags...basically a hobby system. Don't get me wrong, Gentoo is a good distro, but Arch is better in my opinion.

iphitus · 2006-06-29 08:51:21

I see lotsa gentoo users moving to Arch..

I think that's a pretty good indication of what distro to use.

EAD · 2006-06-29 09:14:42

amm tanx guys, but wait, Gentoo has many nice things, isn't it worth the time?
Why ARCH don't have things like flags for example?

starseed42 · 2006-06-29 09:40:14

I've used gentoo on and off for the 3-4 years, and it is really a fine distro. The flags are a neat idea, but as a side effect can cause the occasional annoyance by making you recompile entire packages when you discover you didn't compile in the support for some key feature you need. Be prepared to do a lot of reading, and you'll learn all about configuring everything in linux. I would also suggest that you install it through a live cd so you can have everything you need to keep yourself entertained for the loooong wait .. that being said I switched to Arch for a reason. You lose nothing as far as power, speed, and flexibilty. In addition to an excellent binary package manager , Arch also has the AUR of course .. the approach is different but the functionality is the same..

All that being said here is my approach to linux in general, try everything. People create this software out of the goodness of there hearts for everyone to enjoy

T-Dawg · 2006-06-29 10:17:05

EAD wrote:

Why ARCH don't have things like flags for example?

Because it goes against KISS. The idea is to start with the minimum and add to it if needed.

Gentoo isn't bad. For me it was an unnecesarry hassel with all the compiling and in depth configurations.

vacant · 2006-06-29 11:25:10

EAD wrote:

Why ARCH don't have things like flags for example?

I'm sure some people like playing with the compiler optimize flags etc to trade off speed against stability. You need a lot of time and even at the end of the trials you probably wouldn't notice any subjective difference in speed compared to Arch.

Arch and Yoper were joint fastest on my PC. Gentoo would have been up there with them, but for so much of the time it was slower while it built or compiled updates.

With Arch, I have a distro that is stable, optimised pretty well for my hardware and kept current BUT the time and work needed to do that isn't replicated by all the users - it's done by a few experts who do it quicker and better than I could.

Echo · 2006-06-29 12:35:01

I have Gentoo running on two boxes. One is a server (Backend) for MythTV and the other is a Frontend/Backend for same. The reason I settled in on Gentoo was the dependency issues I ran across w/other distros I had tried. I found it less frustrating to wait for things to compile versus chasing down dependencies. For me it had very little to do with speed. I have used Gentoo longer than any other distro by far.

Now I use Arch on my personal box. When the time comes to upgrade Myth I will change them over to Arch. Why? It's quicker to set up (compiling), the speed of the system is good and, most impotantly, Arch is the first distro that just made "sense". The simplistic approach, pacman, the layout of the OS just seemed very logical to me.

brazzmonkey · 2006-06-29 12:40:16

gentoo's not a distro... it's a set of tool to build your own, customized distro. gentoo is not about optimization (you usually hardly feel any difference by using aggressive compilation settings), it's about customization : use flags allow you choosing which components of a software should be compiled : for instance, php may be compiled with support for mysql, sqlite, etc... you can keep the components you need and drop the others.
arch is a quicker way to set up a fast, efficient desktop workstation. still, arch offers fewer packages than gentoo's portage, and many of them need to be compiled as well (in AUR).

gentoo takes time to install, time to compile but is rather easy to maintain and the docs are very very good. it's true that stable portage tree is not as up-to-date as arch stable branch, but this is probably because gentoo supports many architectures (from x86 to mac or sparc, and now freebsd - which is not an architecture, i know), and development is probably more complicated than arch's one.

there are good things in arch and gentoo, it depends on what you seek. if it's only speed, stay with arch... if time (read : compilation) is not a issue for you, try gentoo.

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-29 13:04:42

I've heard that Gentoo does provide i686 packages now... Still, the stable software is generally a bit behind, the compile times are very long, portage isn't all that good at dealing with orphan packages IIRC, and SystemV initscripts are the default. An optimized Gentoo system, in my experience, boots slower than and is less responsive than an Arch system on the same machine.

(Also, a warning about optimization... It may look attractive, but overoptimizing will increase your compile times at very little benefit.)

clarence · 2006-06-29 13:38:21

Arch does have facilities available for compiler optimisations if your into that kind of thing (I used to be, but I'm ok now) check the wiki.

After having used Gentoo for a year I would say that its great as a learning tool.

Ryujin · 2006-06-29 13:38:58

Arch is faster than gentoo, period. And I don't think that speed should only be determined by a few benchmarks, but overall use, and it dosen't matter how perfect the software is complied as much as dealing with the constant overhead of compiling, stuff runs slower if you need to be compiling in the background all the time.
Not only this, but I Arch's developers seem preety down to earth, they just seem like good guys who want to make a good distro, whereas the gentoo devs have an intereting history, between thier creater now working for microsoft and the recent bickering, Arch just seems more stable from a bussines perspective as well.

Ryujin · 2006-06-29 13:43:27

that was a little negative towards gentoo, gentoo is a great distro, and it is a great concept and thier stable branch is very solid!

McQueen · 2006-06-29 15:33:04

Ryujin wrote:

...between thier creater now working for microsoft and the recent bickering...

Daniel works at ABC Coding Solutions, and you know...everyone bickers.

Ryujin · 2006-06-29 15:34:31

Thank you, I seem to have been misinformed!

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-29 15:41:29

Gentoo is an okay learning tool, but IMHO not as good as Slackware for learning the ropes, what with rc-update and all. The install guide is excellent though.

Ryujin · 2006-06-29 15:50:22

I must second that, it has some of the best documentation, and it generally crosses over to other distros quite well

Riklaunim · 2006-06-29 16:02:29

Generaly you don't run gentoo because it is gentoo but you need it. If you need big package repository, support for other arches and so on, and you want to play in a programmer the you may try gentoo I'm using 64 bit Gentoo and it's nice.

chippy · 2006-06-29 16:59:04

Gentoo is where i started. Using gentoo, you learn even more about linux and computers than you do with arch ;-) . But to answer your main question, while it is fun to play and experiment with for a while, it is not really worth the "hustle". Hope that helped :-)

PS If you're looking for speed, arch is all you need. really

Gullible Jones · 2006-06-29 17:11:46

Correction: you learn more about most Linux distros than you do with Arch - Gentoo gives you experience with SysV initscripts but not BSD ones.

(It also babies you with stuff like rc-update. As I said - Gentoo is good for learning the ropes, Slackware is better.)

Dusty · 2006-06-29 17:18:49

Hey everyone, we interrupt this program with a thank you message from your psychotic neighborhood forum advisor:

This topic had a great potential to turn into a massive flamewar. I want to congratulate the entire community on making it to two pages without nasty conflict, and to encourage further discussion to continue in this helpful vein. You guys rock!

Dusty

EAD · 2006-06-29 20:06:27

Ok, So what can I learn more with Gentoo that in ARCH I can't?

Arch Linux

#1 2006-06-29 07:21:24

Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

#2 2006-06-29 08:13:21

Re: Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

#3 2006-06-29 08:15:14

Re: Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

#4 2006-06-29 08:41:06

Re: Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

#5 2006-06-29 08:46:32

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#6 2006-06-29 08:51:21

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#7 2006-06-29 09:14:42

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#8 2006-06-29 09:40:14

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#9 2006-06-29 10:17:05

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#10 2006-06-29 11:25:10

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#11 2006-06-29 12:35:01

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#12 2006-06-29 12:40:16

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#13 2006-06-29 13:04:42

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#23 2006-06-29 17:11:46

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#24 2006-06-29 17:18:49

Re: Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

#25 2006-06-29 20:06:27

Re: Is it worth the hustle to move to Gentoo ?

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