[geeks] Whoo hoo... now this is a nice Linux

[Caleb Shay]

Well, my reason (and it may not be a good reason for everybody), is 
that I feel it gives me the best of both worlds.  That is, I have 
package management, so keeping track of what got installed where, what 
depends on what else, etc, is handled for me, but it gives me the 
flexibility of having built everything "by hand" the way I wanted to, 
ie I want <program name> built with <feature1> and <feature2>, but not 
<feature 3>, as opposed to being stuck with the features that the 
package maintainer decided I should have or risk breaking the 
dependency/package management system of the distro.

A lot of people who like it are the "hotrodders" who want to try to 
tweak the way everything is built to get that last 1% of extra 
performance out of their systems.  Others like the fact that the 
applications tend to be the latest and greatest (or buggiest, as the 
case may be).  Because of this fact, I would never use it in a 
production environment, but I use it on my personal workstation where 
if something breaks, it's not a big deal.

l337 factor?  I've never really understood this whole mentality.

Doing everything yourself?  Hardly.  It's a package manager based 
system, it's just that the packages are source based rather than 
binary.  If I really wanted to do everything by hand I'd go back to my 
first love, Slackware.  I remember upgrading my libc5 Slack system to 
libc6/glibc2 "by hand", now THAT was a learning experience.  I can't 
remember why I did it, probably just because it was new, I'm prone to 
things like that.

Cheers,

Caleb

On 2003-03-21 03:59:56 +0000 Jonathan C. Patschke <jp at celestrion.net> 
wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Mar 2003, Kurt Huhn wrote:
> 
>>> Is this some new sort of Linux-zealot dicksize war?
>>> 
>> 
>> Just when I thought it was safe to read geeks@ while consuming
>> liquid....
> 
> Seriously, though.  As much as I worded the question like a weary
> antisocial asshole who's spent all day dealing with lusers and hasn't
> had supper yet[0], it's an honest question.
> 
> Everyone around here who uses Gentoo has given me one, ONE argument 
> for
> using it: "You learn so much more because it doesn't do anything for 
> you".
> In fact, at least one of the local zealots is convincing new-to-Linux
> users to install it on their systems.  Most give up in disgust, but 
> the
> one or two that stuck with it think they're all-powerful now because 
> they
> went through half a dozen finger-exercises with tar and "emerge"[1].
> 
> Not that a feeling of power over one's system is a bad thing...
> 
> The whole experience left me with a taste of "You must be at least 
> this
> 1337 to ride Gentoo".  Maybe it's a great OS, but no one's been able 
> to
> answer -why- yet.
> 
> 
> [0] Coincidence?  You decide.
> [1] Whatever the hell that is--so much for not having it do any
>      handholding.