From a Gentooer's point of view...

jb · 2007-09-06 11:40:17

The moment I saw what section that came from, I knew what to expect (like a large portion of the userbase here, I used to use gentoo for a time as well); I didn't know that thread happened because/was influenced by the Linux desktop thread, so I understand them wanting to vent a little.

Having said that, that conversation still did take place so I noted my indifference for the subject matter. I don't think I implied that any of the GenDevs/Mods contributed to that. From what I saw of it, they were all keeping the condescension level minimized in the thread.

Aside: Even more fun; I once went into the debian IRC channel, a few years back, saying: "Alright, I got the nvidia 3d driver working, but now I'm having issues getting RealPlayer to play all of my WMAs."... the reactions from the GPL fanatics were priceless.

erm67 · 2007-09-06 11:50:45

Having said that, that conversation still did take place

The discussion is still going on, now focusing mainly on Arch kernel26, I tried to say that mkinitcpio has a better approach than genkernel, but they answered that pacman deleted the /lib/modules/xxxx-ARCH directory from a live kernel while updating from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22 without a warning that a reboot was needed.
Some devs are/were involved, I foresee the thread will be closed soon by the mods

Cerebral · 2007-09-06 12:50:17

erm67 wrote:

pacman deleted the /lib/modules/xxxx-ARCH directory from a live kernel while updating from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22 without a warning that a reboot was needed.

In all honesty this is a pretty serious issue, and probably needs to be dealt with somehow, but it's kind of off-topic for this thread, so I'll shut up.

shining · 2007-09-06 12:54:02

I remember reading several threads about problems with the arch way of managing kernels, but I couldn't find any of them.

nightmorph · 2007-09-08 04:10:54

erm67 wrote:

And do not forget that the discussion erupted after they found out in the Desktop Linux 2007 survey that Gentoo dropped 2.5 points while Arch grew.

That's not relevant for that particular Gentoo thread though. It isn't brought up at all, and I don't think many people have ever heard of that survey in the first place! I doubt many people care about things like "market share" or arbitrary point systems by a nonscientific poll.

More to the point, don't forget that the survey only had about 38500 votes. That is not at all representative of the Linux installations worldwide.

Besides, it's Arch and Gentoo. Neither is as widely used as, say, Ubuntu, for the desktop. But is market share the goal for either distro? I'd say no. We're each happy with our own niche, our own focus, whatever those may be.

armin · 2007-09-08 07:41:45

After some serious researching I found out the following:

1. Gentoo is named after the gentoo penguin (pygoscelis papua)
2. The gentoo penguin is called Eselspinguin in German
3. Let's strip the word penguin and look up possible translations for Esel using the dict.leo.org german-english dictionary:

ass der Esel
ass [coll.] also [fig.] der Esel auch [fig.]
blockhead der Esel [fig.]
donkey [coll.] also [fig.] der Esel auch [fig.]
dullard der Esel - Person
jackass der Esel

4. For whatever reason (probably because it was the first entry) we choose "ass" as our english translation of "Esel"
5. Now let's try to translate "ass" back to german, again dict.leo.org:

ass (Amer.) [vulg.] der Arsch [vulg.]
ass (Brit.) [fig.] der Dummkopf
ass der Esel
ass [coll.] also [fig.] der Esel auch [fig.]
ass [zool.] das Grautier [ugs.] [hum.]

6. Let's again take the first entry (we want to be consistent after all): "Arsch"
7. We know from this thread that there are some native german speakers with strange dialects that pronounce "Archlinux" as "Arschlinux",
therefore we can write "Arch" instead of "Arsch"
8. As the common mathemathican would say, the problem is trivial:

Gentoo Linux ~ Arch Linux

In addition, we can reduce this to it's common denominator:

Linux

Thank you for reading my serious, highly sophisticated analysis.

erm67 · 2007-09-08 11:20:25

nightmorph wrote:

It isn't brought up at all, and I don't think many people have ever heard of that survey in the first place!
More to the point, don't forget that the survey only had about 38500 votes. That is not at all representative of the Linux installations worldwide.

Well there was at least a thread about the survey short before 'that' thread appeared with pretty much the same persons involved, (can't find it because gentoo forums are locked) and did you read the first post?

lufthanza wrote:

I hear there is a rivalry (maybe one-sided) between gentoo and arch. I looked into Arch to see what it's like and they use 90% precompiled packages!! How can they even compare themselves to Gentoo?

Statistically a sample of 38.500 out of a population of a few millions is more than enough otherwise it would be a census and not a statistical description. You could object that the only the readers of Desktop Linux took part to the survey (the sample frame) and therefore the sample was not truly random, and this is probably true.
Does this mean that gentoo is not losing user base and Arch is not gaining momentum?

Last edited by erm67 (2007-09-08 11:27:19)

shining · 2007-09-08 12:40:18

Why was that thread locked? It first was about how Gentoo was superior than Arch in the kernel area, and then in the java area :d
Well, hopefully Arch will get better in both, if all these complaints are valid.

armin · 2007-09-08 12:52:36

erm67 wrote:

Statistically a sample of 38.500 out of a population of a few millions is more than enough otherwise it would be a census and not a statistical description. You could object that the only the readers of Desktop Linux took part to the survey (the sample frame) and therefore the sample was not truly random, and this is probably true.
Does this mean that gentoo is not losing user base and Arch is not gaining momentum?

Never trust any statistics you did not fake yourself. I could state that the survey shows that Desktop Linux lost readers that use Gentoo and gained readers that use Arch and no one could disprove it.

[to everyone]

I agree with nightmorph, everyone here or over there, using Arch or Gentoo just chose their distro because they liked it best for whatver reason, may it be the color of the logo, who cares?

Distro bashing sucks, if you don't like one, don't use it, forget about it's existence. And if you like bashing so much, go bash Microsoft or do some shell scripting

hussam · 2007-09-08 13:15:00

nightmorph wrote:

Besides, it's Arch and Gentoo. Neither is as widely used as, say, Ubuntu, for the desktop. But is market share the goal for either distro? I'd say no. We're each happy with our own niche, our own focus, whatever those may be.

Desktop share isn't everything. Most ISPs in Lebanon use Gentoo for their servers and I bet a lot of others all over the world use Gentoo as well. There's also tens of thousands of desktops out there running Fedora or Redhat.
I haven't tried Gentoo but although Ubuntu does have a enormous user base, I doubt it is installed on more computers than Gentoo or Fedora/Redhat. I'm not against Ubuntu here, I'm just saying that the number of people in #ubuntu and ubuntuforums doesn't really mean anything. It only means that many new Linux users have tried Ubuntu. Also a bigger percentage of Ubuntu users hang out on irc than Gentoo/OpenSuSE/ArchLinux users.

Misfit138 · 2007-09-08 13:20:19

The thread and the entire Gentoo forums are locked for maintenance.

Eliteforce · 2007-09-08 13:20:24

armin wrote:

Distro bashing sucks, if you don't like one, don't use it, forget about it's existence. And if you like bashing so much, go bash Microsoft or do some shell scripting

bashism also sucks

hussam wrote:

Also a bigger percentage of Ubuntu users hang out on irc than Gentoo/OpenSuSE/ArchLinux users.

how can you know that?

Last edited by Eliteforce (2007-09-08 13:22:12)

shining · 2007-09-08 13:32:21

Misfit138 wrote:

The thread and the entire Gentoo forums are locked for maintenance.

Oh I see, I feel stupid now, that was even already mentioned by erm67.
That is interesting, keeping a read access to the forums during maintenance.
Usually, its the whole thing that is brought down (at least in my experience).

hussam · 2007-09-08 13:35:58

Eliteforce wrote:

hussam wrote:
Also a bigger percentage of Ubuntu users hang out on irc than Gentoo/OpenSuSE/ArchLinux users.
how can you know that?

Because otherwise, that would mean there's only 150 people on the whole planet using opensuse.

shining · 2007-09-08 13:37:36

armin wrote:

Distro bashing sucks, if you don't like one, don't use it, forget about it's existence.

Stupid people bash, others try to make constructive criticisms.

In my ignorance and naivety, I believe that Arch is not perfect, that Gentoo is certainly better in some areas, and that Arch might learn from it.

armin · 2007-09-08 13:57:38

shining wrote:

Stupid people bash, others try to make constructive criticisms.

Depends on the point of view. Someone who says "this sucks" may think it's constructive .

shining wrote:

In my ignorance and naivety, I believe that Arch is not perfect, that Gentoo is certainly better in some areas, and that Arch might learn from it.

Neither is any other distro in my opinion. As for Arch+Gentoo, I can't tell, as I've yet to try Gentoo. Maybe they are just different? Can't give any pro or contra on this. I guess it mostly depends on what you are expecting from a distro.

armin · 2007-09-08 14:05:10

Eliteforce wrote:

bashism also sucks

as does zshism and anything else you might mix into a shell script that should be posix-compatible

hussam · 2007-09-08 15:59:39

armin wrote:

Distro bashing sucks, if you don't like one, don't use it, forget about it's existence. And if you like bashing so much, go bash Microsoft or do some shell scripting

Actually Microsoft did make a shell scripting language 'Windows PowerShell'. It's weak when compared to Bash but it does try to imitate it.

Naib · 2007-09-08 22:23:15

erm67 wrote:

Having said that, that conversation still did take place
The discussion is still going on, now focusing mainly on Arch kernel26, I tried to say that mkinitcpio has a better approach than genkernel, but they answered that pacman deleted the /lib/modules/xxxx-ARCH directory from a live kernel while updating from 2.6.21 to 2.6.22 without a warning that a reboot was needed.
Some devs are/were involved, I foresee the thread will be closed soon by the mods

it is *an* approach. mkintcpio is nice for Arch, but wouldn't work with how Gentoo works, thus you cannot say mkintcpio is better then genkernel simply because genkernel also generates the kernel, mkintcpio doesn't do (I may be wrong) that so you can't say one is better then the other.

For starters the gentoo way is actually configure a kernel by hand and thus an initrd isn't always needed, genkernel is used to simplyfiy building the liveCD's for the gentoo-dev's (as was described at last years Gentoo-UK meet), it just so happens that some ppl like to use it to build their running kernel (even though the forums & IRC all say do a manual)

The real problem here is the original question (like most flamewars) was wrong.
Emac's vs VI
GNOME vs KDE
C vs C++
...

it causes lines & sides to be drawn which causes defensive &|| offensive comments to be drawn.
The correct question in all cases should be:
What editor is best for what situation
What desktop is best for what situation
what language is best for what situation
what distro is best for what situation...

IF VI was sooo perfect why was Emac's ever written? the fact is VI isn't perfect and thus other editiors came into existance, but for some VI is what they need and for them VI is perfect, the height of perfection for an editor
The same can be said for every other geekdom religious flamewar ever created.

The fact is no distro is perfect for everyone, that is why there are soo many and each are unique (be it minor differences or large differences)
In fact the whole "my distro is greater then your distro" is even worse then the other flamewars simply because all distro's are essentially the same... I can run GNOME on any distro and it behaves effetely the same, I can run lsof on all and again they will all behave the same... in face there is very little that differentiates one distro from another (package management, init & configs are pretty much it, and that is a small part of a running system) but it is these differences that are soo critical to that system functioning and being kept uptodate.

As long as a distro meets that persons requirements then there is no reason to change, when it doesnt (and another doesl) they change... (hence why I went: RH=>Mandrake=>Gentoo and stuck for the last 4, all in the course of 10years) simple as that. There is no need for the ZOMG ${DISTRO_OLD} is rubbish, I am out of here, ${DISTRO_NEW} is soo much bettar!!!!11111one (ok that may be more unique to gentoo but still ).

For me Gentoo fills all my needs for my desktop and it will stay there as long as gentoo stays in active-dev
Arch fills my needs for my server and it *could* stay there for some time (if the stupid kernel-management system doesn't bite me again... removing /lib/modules/`uname -r` while said kernel is in use is BAD!!! simple as that!)
Debian kinda fills my needs on my other server (but no other replacement for that... ARM CPU, and gentoo not really an option)
Fedora kinda serves my needs on my work machines (hassle of re-building with arch is outweighting the need to get away from their broken package management)
and Ubuntu serves my needs for quick installs

Horses for courses

shining wrote:

Why was that thread locked? It first was about how Gentoo was superior than Arch in the kernel area, and then in the java area :d
Well, hopefully Arch will get better in both, if all these complaints are valid.

Whole forum is locked, forum being upgraded to mysql5 and full UTF-8 support. database is backedup and is being sandbox'ed on mysql5 system right now (while original system live for Read-Only). There are alot of there sites (Arch included) that have links to Gentoo's forums for reference and anyway teh forums are an invaluable place of infomation (be it in a RO state), will be live hopefully my monday

hussam wrote:

armin wrote:
Distro bashing sucks, if you don't like one, don't use it, forget about it's existence. And if you like bashing so much, go bash Microsoft or do some shell scripting
Actually Microsoft did make a shell scripting language 'Windows PowerShell'. It's weak when compared to Bash but it does try to imitate it.

Powershell does actually have one thing over most linux shells (eps the main SH-based ones) and that is C# objects can be returned in script-calls and passed into another command. Imagine if you could do that (be it with python,perl,....) in BASH, ie arrays,strings,ints no longer all that get passed, but say python methods or classes to hold init-states... it would be interesting.
that is the only real thing that powershell has that linux shell's dont, shame it had to be gimped with using C# objects

Misfit138 · 2007-09-09 00:22:57

Well said, Naib. Well said.

erm67 · 2007-09-09 08:10:08

Naib wrote:

For starters the gentoo way is actually configure a kernel by hand and thus an initrd isn't always needed, genkernel is used to simplyfiy building the liveCD's for the gentoo-dev's (as was described at last years Gentoo-UK meet), it just so happens that some ppl like to use it to build their running kernel (even though the forums & IRC all say do a manual)

It happens users use genkernel because the Gentoo handbook says it is an alternative to self compiling and you can bet 100% inesperienced or lazy users will follow the alternative route after reading the user manual. On the other side they use the 'it is just a developer-tool' excuse to avoid fixing user issues, and maybe bash newbies on the forums or IRC for following the handbook. If it is just a developer-tool then delete the section from the Gentoo handbook.
To me this is just another sign of decadence.

Taken from the official Gentoo handbook:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/h … t=1&chap=7

Now it is time to configure and compile your kernel source. You can use genkernel for this, which will build a generic kernel
 as used by the Installation CD. We explain the "manual" configuration first though, as it is the best way to optimize your
 environment.

If you want to manually configure your kernel, continue now with Default: Manual Configuration. If you want to use genkernel you
 should read Alternative: Using genkernel instead.

Also with Arch you can self compile your kernel or use the stock precompiled kernel.
Using genkernel (or the stock arch) has several advantages also for advanced users because in many cases if the boot fails it drops to a reduced shell running from ram that can be used to fix or identify the problem, this can be done also self-compiling a kernel but is more complicated.

Last edited by erm67 (2007-09-09 08:41:40)

Naib · 2007-09-09 10:58:38

erm67 wrote:

....

I could quite happily drag this into why Gentoo is better then Arch, but what is the point. As I already stated that is pointless. Both distro's have their pro's and cons, the fact that every gentoo user hasn't converter to Arch is proof in itself that for some ppl Gentoo > Arch

Yes genkernel has its problems, but so does arch w.r.t. kernels so shall we leave it there? (for starters with mkintcpio you have an initrd file, cant bodge in bootsplash that easily with an already needed initrd now can you , just like with genkernel also generating an initrd you cant easily get bootsplash)
I don't want to effectively mirror the discussion that will continue over at f.g.o over here cause all that will produce is a load more forum noise but a bias towards Arch (like over at f.g.o there is a bias toward gentoo funny enough)

arch has its place and it is good
gentoo has its place and it is also good

happy days \o/
at least the choice is better then Vista home premium or Vista Ultimate

Last edited by Naib (2007-09-09 11:03:55)

cycle · 2007-09-09 11:50:21

Naib wrote:

at least the choice is better then Vista home premium or Vista Ultimate

haha damn right.

these x distro vs y distro threads really are absurd, try 'em all (or at least do some research) and pick which ever suits you + your situation best.

Leigh · 2007-09-09 17:13:25

Those threads remind me of my softball days. There was a league with a bunch of teams. Even though my team didn't make it to the playoffs, I thought we were the best! we just had a few off days is all. Like wouldn't it be nice to be on the Arch softball team playing the Gentoos, and after we whooped their butts, we shake their hands and say, hey! you guys played a great game!

Well it would be more constructive anyway

erm67 · 2007-09-10 19:07:58

Naib wrote:

will continue over at f.g.o over here cause all that will produce is a load more forum noise but a bias towards Arch (like over at f.g.o there is a bias toward gentoo funny enough)

The forums there were closed ........
Anyway I was not saying that arch is better or gentoo is better, if if 5% of computer user uses linux and 8% gentoo or arch (lets assume desktop linux was right) it just only 0.4% (the best part of course).

Last edited by erm67 (2007-09-10 19:08:35)

Arch Linux

#51 2007-09-06 11:40:17

Re: From a Gentooer's point of view...

#52 2007-09-06 11:50:45

Re: From a Gentooer's point of view...

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