Re: [gentoo-user] Time to move on?

[Mike Diehl <mdiehl@diehlnet.com>]

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On Saturday 21 March 2009 21:00:11 Dale wrote:
> Mike Kazantsev wrote:
> > On Sat, 21 Mar 2009 19:17:53 -0600
> >
> > Mike Diehl <mdiehl@diehlnet.com> wrote:
> >> Has Gentoo become such a moving target that it's no longer suitable for
> >> normal, every day, usage?
> >
> > If you're prepared to update you system at least once a week and
> > have up-to-date knowledge of all the installed stuff, so you can at
> > least make a decision whether you need some functionality or not...
> > Then yep, I'd suggest gentoo.
> >
> > If you don't care about either then I don't understand why you started
> > using it in first place - red hat or debian-based distro would've been
> > much easier and simplier.
>
> I don't know if this is still the case or not but Mandrake updates
> seemed like a reinstall on top of itself to me.  Sort of like when you
> reinstall windoze.  It doesn't delete anything, user wise anyway, but
> just puts all the new stuff in there.
>
> You don't get the latest updates with Mandrake like Gentoo does but that
> doesn't appear to be to important to you since you don't update very
> often anyway.  I suspect some other distro may better suite your needs.
> I been using Gentoo for years and update at least weekly and I rarely
> have trouble.  However, if you let the updates pile up, you can have
> issues that are difficult to deal with.
>
> Overall, I agree with Mike here.  Update regularly or use some other
> distro as he mentioned.
>
> Dale
>
> :-)  :-)

Ok, when I started using Gentoo, I remember a discussion about how often to do 
an emege world and the prevailing wisdom at the time was to do it when you 
needed a new feature, or fix.  If the new wisdom is to update, say, weekly, I 
can live with that on the local machines here at the home/office.  I'm a bit 
concerned about the servers I have co-located out of state, though.  On the 
other hand, those are production machines and probably don't need to be 
upgraded many times during their lifetime. 

I've run several other distributions over the years and up until recently I've 
never looked back from Gentoo.

I ran Slackware back when it came on 3.5" floppies.  Of course it had NO 
package manager, so when Redhat hit the scene, I converted.

Redhat, back then was built for a generic 486, so when Mandrake came along 
with pentium optimizations, I converted.

But like you said, upgrading Redhat/Mandrake always seemed a bit windoze'ish 
to me.  You really were simply piling the upgrade on top of the old system, 
like you said earlier.

I used Suse on a project at work and hated every minute of it, and the help 
forums were mostly flamefests.  Never even considered Suse for "real" work.

Like I said, I've been using Gentoo for years now.  When I met Daniel Robbins, 
I'd already been using Gentoo for several months.  Gentoo is still the most 
customizable and optimize-able distribution available.  Sometimes it's down 
right elegant.  http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10106

However, lately, Gentoo seems to have been plagued with problems.  Circular 
blockers.  32/64 bit libraries.  Package re-organization.  Others.

So here is the question:  Are these just growing pains, or is this the trend 
with Gentoo?  If I resolve to update frequently, will these problems become 
more rare?

I'll start a new thread to seek help with my MythTV upgrade problem.

Thanks for listening.

Mike.

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