On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 01:56, Ben Rosenberg wrote: [snip]
The Gentoo thing is that all of one's software has been optimised for whatever system it's running on because it's all been compiled by the user. It seems like a lot of work for those of us who actual have jobs, wives/husbands and just lives in general. :) It's all the hip thing now for some reason..it's not all uber corp. in nature. Or at least those are some of the reasons I've heard / read.
You highlight one of the reasons I switched back to SuSE from ROCK Linux
(http://www.rocklinux.org/). Compiling the whole lot from source is not
quite as bad at it sounds, and you _do_ get a system that is optimised
for the hardware you have (if you know what you are doing). It is a bit
time-consuming however.
I do believe that Gentoo has got a very good thing going as they have
replicated something that *BSD has, a ports tree. And if you stick to
their stable ports tree, you will not see breakages a lot, a bit like
you should not use the Sid tree in Debian unless you are happy to have
things break now and then.
As for building from source being 'all the rage' I have to disagree. I
was using ROCK some three years ago, and I believe that Slackware was
compiling things from source as well long before that. It might be
however that the threshold for using a compiled-from-source distribution
has dropped, making it more available to Joe User.
I will probably give Gentoo a try on a box sometime, but SuSE is what is
staying on my main workstation. Precisely for the reason you gave in the
text I cut away, it is stable and SuSE doesn't piss about with it a
whole lot, meaning it 'Just Works [tm]'.
Regards,
--
Anders Karlsson