gentoo

[Kurt Granroth]

On Tuesday 25 October 2005 12:34 pm, Josh Coffman wrote:
> someone once recommended gentoo to me... I've recently
> run into a couple guys (not plug members) that also run
> gentoo. So I started thinking... Anyway, on
> distrowatch there was an article on rr4; a livedvd
> based on gentoo. know if it's pretty faithful to
> gentoo?
>
> any laptops on gentoo? is it hard to keep gentoo boxen
> updated?
>
> I'm still pretty green and the idea of gentoo installs
> is a little scary to me. Not to mention that while I
> like to play around with stuff and try distros, I
> don't
> have a lot of time to mess with it.

I've used gentoo quite a bit, including on a laptop.  It works great for the 
most part and it's a great distro for getting your hands dirty with Linux.  
Also, if you want to eek out every last performance enhancement, then gentoo 
can't be beat.

HOWEVER, if you are, as you say, "pretty green" and "don't have a lot of time" 
then I would recommend staying away from gentoo.  Gentoo can be a massive 
pain if you don't know Linux inside-and-out.  And even if you do know, it 
still takes more time to do things than I would like.  For instance, in 
theory, updating should be as simple as 'emerge update' (and then wait a few 
hours or day).  In practice, things always break.  Just updated glibc?  Oops, 
that causes metalog to seg-fault.  Better install syslog-ng for now until 
it's fixed.  Things like that happen quite a bit.  Really, if you are 
new(ish) to Linux, then a distro like SuSE, Ubuntu, or MEPIS would be *much* 
better.

Kurt