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Measuring The Benefits Of The Gentoo Approach

Posted by timothy on from the not-necessarily-what-you'd-think dept.

An anonymous reader writes "We're constantly hearing how the source based nature of the Gentoo distro makes better use of your hardware, but no-one seems to have really tested it. What kind of gains are involved over distros which use binary packaging? The article is here."

1 of 467 comments (clear)

  1. Gentoo similiar to *BSD? by jtotheh · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    I have never tried Gentoo but I ran FreeBSD for a while. With FreeBSD you have source for the whole system as well as for any "ports" you install. There are procedures for doing a "make world" that recompiles all of it. You can get the source changes to go to the next version and with a bit of chicken and egg stuff about compilers if that has changed, you can compile yourself the upgrade.

    I ended up bagging it because there is a fair amount of stuff for Linux that is missing in BSDs (or I wasn't willing to expend the effort to get to run through compatibility mode). Java, Flash, etc. no flames please, I know some people work these things out - I just got tired of the hassles with it when I could rpm/apt-get it with Linux.

    I thought the FreeBSD was really high quality though.

    Is Gentoo a similiar model? Has someone used both?