Well, its all a matter of how you like things layed out most of which is
pure preferance. Debian is an entirely non commercial dist, and
incorperates no commercial code, which is an ethical bonus for much of
the community. It also has a pretty nice package management solution, a
good instalation program, and is a very seasoned dist. As far as skill
is concerned it is best suited to people with a moderate to advanced
skill base. It's .deb pkg format is also *somewhat* widely used.

Gentoo is a very new dist, and implements package management in a very
new and slick way. Downloading the package and its dependancys then
compiling them all from source automaticly. This has the benifit of
allowing you to have the entire system compiled optimised for your cpu
instruction set. While it worked perfectly on my test computer, I would
be surprised if that was always the case. Oddly it uses its own system
initialisation system, whitch is basied on a dependancy ideaology, you
would have to have a look to understand what I mean, its cool but non
standard, I would like to see sysv compatability built in so one
wouldent have to hack one up if they needed/wanted it for some reason.
Gentoo is for advanced users only. It has no automated initial
installation program, and no custom configuration programs. It does
however have adaquate instructions to get up and running, after that
your on your own. (which is the way I perfer things)

Personaly speaking I use slackware on my production coputers (1 server,
1 laptop, and a main box), I have installed gentoo on one of my test
computers and have been quite impressed. I like slackware because it
stays out of your way, and doesnt have silly config tools cluttering up
the box (mostly not pointing at debian but at redhat and friends). I
would use gentoo over debian purely because linux is my hobby and I have
used debian before and thus would not learn anything new by using it.

ttyl


On Sun, 2002-04-21 at 13:40, David A. Sinck wrote:
> 
> Soo...given that I'm about to majorly upgrade an aging box I have,
> could I hear some lucid, preferably not too flamming, coversation
> about debian vs gentoo?
> 
> TIA,
> 
> David
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