I'm a little reluctant to say this, but it's been a couple of months now
since I switched back to Gentoo, and I want to shout out my pleasure that
this system has been performing admirably well this time around, in
comparison with earlier installations.  None of the earlier installations
were unacceptable, in fact, Gentoo remained my favorite.  I moved to Ubuntu
because maintainance of the Gentoo boxes was much more time consuming.

I've watched Gentoo plummet in the popularity ratings, for example at
distrowatch.  I've watched as the best documentation EVER on gentoo wiki has
fallen off the edge of the world---indeed, I am grief-stricken and perplexed
about that.  I had to debate with myself about whether to go back to
Gentoo.  Ubuntu had played to many tricks on me, at great personal cost.  I
finally made the leap, and it was a soft landing indeed.

I scoffed at the email from this list saying that   emerge -uDva world and
revdep-rebuild problems were not normal!  I had posted that I had NEVER (in
a couple of years or more of Gentoo use) gotten all the way through a
maintainance cycle of emerge -uDva --newuse world, revdep-rebuild, and
emerge --depclean.  I never had (or perhaps very, very seldom), and I spent
a lot of time working on it.  Still the system more or less worked.

Now, however, I have not had any such problem, or maybe I should say, the
one or two times I have it was easy to fiigure things out.  This is a major
turnaround.

Is it because I'm more experienced, or perhaps more cautious?  I am running
~amd64, and have several overlays installed under layman.  I don't know, but
I tend to think the distribution is more mature.

Perhaps this isn't the best place to put a word of thanks.  It's the best I
will do for now.  Thank you to all the developers and all the list people
who have consistently given the highest and most professional level of
assistance to a rather clueless user.  And never a cranky wine, like on
other lists, never any complaint.  This is typical, and always has been with
Gentoo's community.

I hope that at some point I can help with at least the documentation,
although I surely don't wish to pollute the space of the best docs (IMHO) in
the linux community.

Go figure: the popularity figures plunge, but the distro just gets better
and better.  Viva Gentoo...

Now I can go and get lost in the upgrade of gcc.

Alan Davis


Alan Davis

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world,  but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing---that's what counts.

   ----Richard Feynman