Re: [gentoo-user] Is Gentoo Healthy? (The Return)

[kashani <kashani-list@badapple.net>]

Jerry McBride wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 July 2007 08:13:59 pm Philip Webb wrote:
>> 070704 Colleen Beamer wrote:
>>> Danyelle Gragsone wrote:
>>>> If gentoo became an *easy* distro like sickbayon or ubuntu.. I would
>>>> stop using it. Seriously..  user friendly distros is not what I am
>>>> looking for.. I am looking for a distro to have one fun and learn.
>>> I second this sentiment.  Since starting to use Gentoo in 2004, all
>>> other distros pale in comparison.  Yes, there have been a couple of
>>> hurdles, but it was all learning.  I view these, not as annoyances, but
>>> challenges.  I love what I have learned about my system with Gentoo and
>>> there is *no* other distro that has a package management system that is
>>> better than portage, IMHO.  So, thanks from me to all the devs!  :-)
>> Thirded (smile).
>>
> 
> Fourth one here...
> 
> Gentoo has been one of the most rewarding linux experiences that I've had in 
> years. The only thing that even comes close is LFS... but then upgrading it 
> is a nightmare.
> 

	I'd like to tell the previous four people to move on to meaningful 
challenges like reverse proxying HTTP to split media and application 
serving or db replication or ldap backended mail systems or hell 
anything other than installing a base system. :-) Come on, installing an 
OS shouldn't be complicated in this century.

	Given a choice I prefer my tools extremely powerful AND easy, but I'm a 
professional sys admin with a large pragmatic streak and a low tolerance 
for technology that makes me jump through hoops. This is coincidentally 
why Mysql continues to be used in a hundred time more places than 
Postgres. I find Gentoo to be both easy and powerful most of the time so 
I have few complaints. However his idea that installing an OS has to be 
some sort of trial by fire to prove your worth is wacky.

	I say bring on the easiness. Make a big fat button after the liveCD 
loads that says "Just install it for me in a nice default kinda way so I 
can start playing with this whole USE flag thing I've heard so much 
about" and be done with it. Yes, yes you can still choose to set things 
up yourself and frankly I still find command line fdisk to be much 
simpler to use than any other tool. After that we can start working on a 
big fat button that says "I handle all the USE flag stuff rather than 
having to figure out if equery, ufed, emerge, eix, qpkg, and whatnot 
tells you what you want to know". Wouldn't that be nice?

	Gentoo got lucky (or maybe I did) when it was the only distro I could 
get to install on a office server some idiot has spec'ed with a bleeding 
edge gaming motherboard that refused to boot any other Linux distro. I 
ran through the lengthy install because I was out of options and then 
found I liked the system. I like to think I've been an asset over the 
years for Gentoo (1500 helpful posts on the forum and counting), but how 
many busy professionals have taken a look at the install and decided 
"fsck that, I've got ninety other things I could be doing" and walked away?"

kashani, Gentoo user for five years and remembers when they added the *, 
the bright green for new USE flags, and then sorted the active USE flags 
first in the emerge output and still thinks the person(s) who came up 
with those UI tweaks was a genius.
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