Thoughts on Gentoo

[Kurt Granroth]

On Friday 08 September 2006 00:47, Kenneth wrote:
> Any Gentoo users around here?
>
> I'm taking my second stab at setting it up on a spare partition.  I'm not
> sure yet if I'm going to keep it, but curious what others think of it.

There were six of us in the office at work using Gentoo for about two years.  
One by one, we each finally had enough and switched to something else (mostly 
Ubuntu or SUSE).  In fact, the guy who originally pushed us towards Gentoo 
and was the staunchest advocate of it sent out his "last straw" message just 
a few days ago.

Why?  HORRIBLE quality assurance on the packages.  We grew to dread every 
update because we knew that something else was going to completely break... 
since *something* always did.  If we were lucky, then it would be a little 
package that could either be fixed or blocked or worked around.  If we 
weren't lucky (and it feels like we rarely were), then we would have an 
unusable system for a few hours or day or so.  This was hardly a viable 
arrangement in a work environment.

Gentoo has some great ideas and, in the beginning, showed a lot of promise.  
But if you want a reliable distribution, you had better be in one of the 
following camps:
1. Never update your system
2. Use it as a LAMP (or other "simple" server) system with minimal packages
3. Have a lot of time to mess around with it

I do recommend putting it on your spare partition, though.  It can be a lot of 
fun if you like customizing things and aren't relying on it for anything 
critical.

Kurt