Gentoo Ricer Comparison
Dozix007 writes "The folks over at Funroll-Loops have created a funny comparison between the Ricer fad gripping the US, and Gentoo Linux. In a quote from the site 'Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball bats...'"
Jesus Christ, is there a /.er who hasn't been here? I've seen it linked dozens of times, just about any time there's a Gentoo story. Old news.
WTF? This is so old... is an editor cranky and want them slashdotted? :(
...and it's stupid. It's insulting to the hard work by the Gentoo folks, and ignorant to imply that a) Gentoo is the only distribution that has a few vocal-but-clueless users mixed in with the friendly, intelligent, and helpful ones, and that b) just because these vocal-but-cluesless users don't have a good reason for using Gentoo means that there is none.
This is just great evidence for how far downhill Slashdot's gone.
ZOMGbbq my code runs soooooooooo much faster then those stewped other n00bs who use binaries. they r teh missing out on all the gcc screensaver pwnage.
How about an article about non-patched XP machines having bugs, or something.. oh wait.. already tried that. :P
Stupid cars.. I'm a member of http://www.ricecopforums.com/ I put "rice tickets" on stupid ricer cars.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
lets offend as many people as possible... lets see.. dress up CmdrTaco in blackface with a bucket of chicken in his hand.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
Three "Pro (Insert Distro Here)" *n*x stories on the front page, let the trolling begin!
Up tight morons who spend their lives getting so offended by these 'ricers'.
I couldn't give a rat's arse about these people. If they want to spend weeks getting an imagined 1% performance improvement then great, I'm quite happy to ignore them.
Seems like here we have a case where something is so good that people start to downplay it. I find gentoo to be a great distribution, while some people might say they are 1337 by installing it, its a rather simple installation where you just follow the instructions. And I love it because of how minimalistic it is, I install what I want and nothing that I don't want. That's what I love about gentoo!
...from this recent comment.
... or does entire article deserve a -5 for Troll, and Flamebait? This isn't informative, enlightening, or particularily funny whatsoever. Slashdot is supposed to be 'News for nerds. Stuff that matters.' What some kids do in their spare time to flip off an entire community of hackers, users, and people has no place on a site like this. I've learned more about Linux hanging around in #gentoo and being apart of the forums these short six months than I have anywhere else in the last two years.
My morale with this is the same when playing Unreal Tournament - Don't bash the newbies. We were all newbies once.
ahh, this is golden:
To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code. Even if I do occasionally get my CFLAGS in a muddle! I think I speak for Slashdot when I say that Gentoo is the only sane option for getting the most from your hardware!
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I saw one of those oversized wings on a 2002 Mustang today. Nice car, kept clean, but with this ragged looking elevated flap marring the back like a vast plastic hangnail. It wasn't even the same color. I swear, I wanted to make a citizen's arrest. Then I noticed it was a V6, so I let the loser off with a warning.
--- Ban humanity.
Out of curiosity what distro do you use? I'm sure someone can find some negative stereotype to lump you into.
I wish people could use their computer as a tool rather than a defining characteristic of who they are. This crap about "what your OS says about who you are" is rather bothersome and prevents people from looking at a computer and figuring out how to make it do what they need it to do. The thing Slashdot, and many others, need to ask themselves is why do they care what someone else installs on THEIR computer?
But its the same shit with OpenBSD idiots: "we're uber secure because the sources are *audited* (wow!) and the default install hasn't had any security holes blah blah (ooohh!)." - Nevermind you can't tell your face from a hat full of arseholes.
And NetBSD: "but its so well engineered and consistient and lean and mean and nearly runs on my toaster." - Nice, next time spare me the bullshit advertising and tell me why it runs on less CPUs than Linux if it is so great.
FreeBSD: (always with the Linux envy...) "its more scalable and engineered, oh and scalable, and fast, and best tcp/ip stack. Oh and its fast and engineered and consistient and stablestest and scalable and Linux is only faster on benchmarks and actually FreeBSD is faster in all areas that you can't measure." - Err, okay, you blathering fuckwit.
Oh wait, this is gentoo rice we are talking about.
...I am a Gentoo user and fan.
/etc/inittab file.
Gentoo is not necessarily good because of the product, but in large part because of the process. When you finish doing a stage whatever (especially 1) install, you end up learning an awful lot about Linux that someone that drops in a SuSe/RedHat/Fedora Core/whatever disk doesn't know. Most experienced Linux users will see that a user that understands whats going on under the hood will fare better than one who gives you a thousand yard stare when you mention the
I think the benefits of compiling from source on everything are varied at best, and only sometimes outweighed by the time necessary to do it. That said, in some cases it is a good thing - if used correctly, the USE flags are nifty and let you compile without support for features you don't need. This can be quite useful, and provide a modest speed up in some cases.
Ricers aside, Gentoo provides a superb package management system in the spirit of apt/yum, and is also source based. It boosts users with moderate knowledge level to a better understanding of the architecture of a Linux system, and this can lead to some absurd enthusiasm about the distro for the younger/more impressioanable types, but I take it much the same way I take any fanboy mentality: you'll see the upsides and the downsides as time goes on. I happen to think Gentoo is great on the whole, so I use it.
Its just as childish for the folks annoyed by the Gentoo zealots to turn around be be anti-Gentoo zealots, creating webpages and ranting on about how horrible a community it is. Stop by the forums and you'll see its a responsive, well informed group, the majority of whom are quite reasonable.
You know, I don't want to be always be the politically correct one, but the term ricer has always seemed inappropriate when coming out of a non-asian person's mouth.
Now, it does so happen that many "ricers" are asian, that the practice probably originated in west-coast asian-american subculture. It is likewise true that East Asians consume large amounts of rice, although this is not necessarily true of Asian Americans (many of whom are sadly about as out of touch with their culture of their ancestors as that white guy who says he's German-Irish-Italian).
But I guess it just seems crass to me to take a practice and associate it with the race that does it. It would be like calling Karaoke "Yellow Yodeling". Sure, it's funny, but I would imagine that for the vast majority of non-ricer Asian-Americans it might get tiring to constantly hear their ethnicity lampooned by non-asians who lack the sensitivity to seperate a culture from a steryotype.
But maybe that's just me. Personally, I wouldn't use this term.
After all, it really just is modding Asian imports. White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
Oh, I hear someone say, "Potatoes aren't the staple of white america! It's not the same!" Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice? They eat mantou, I kind of bread, instead. Why? Because rice doesn't grow in subarctic climates.
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh? Man I love ignorance.
But hey, the tinted windows, exhaust pipe, and large Momo sticker across the top of the windshield must add at least 100hp right?
Hmm i use Gentoo and OpenBSD as my main OS'es, does this make me say "what about wankers"?
But we like pototoe and rice burritos!
Its not what distro you use. As I said I like debian. But stable is not a good desktop distro so I try out ubuntu and love it. Gentoo is awesome because it used one of the best things about BSD (source based distribution) to make linux better. OSS is more about a marketplace of ideas, where projects tinker. Just because someone likes gentoo dosent make them a performance whore, and just because someone likes distro X it dosent mean anything except that they are a member of the communtiy and are trying to do the best with the options that they are given. Lets not let our community be destroyed by idiots on websites or idiots on message boards.
Did Glenn Beck rape and kill a girl in 1990? gb1990.com
gentoo is so damned easy to install now... anyone who can follow simple, well written, walk-you-through-the whole-thing instructions can do it... There's nothing l33t about it at all now... if you can't install Gentoo, then there's no hope for you.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I use Gentoo Linux, and I'm anything from a hardcore user. I don't care about having the fastest most optimized packages. I use it because I find it the easiest distribution to configure, customize, and get working correctly. If I have a problem I can usually find an answer my searching. If not I can just ask a question on the forums. The Gentoo community is the friendliest, most responsive there is. I've never seen a touch of the inferred elitismm, and their accomplisments are amazing.
I studied math in school, and the seemingly unimportant achievements of Gentoo users which they enjoy remind me of the satisfaction I got out of every proof I completed. They may seem unimportant and pointless to those not in the field. But real satisfaction and results follow from these activities.
There are always people who can not understand intellectual achivement. But I had expected better of slashdot. I suppose I was naively mistaken.
You might as well check out the Gentoo OPTIMIZBATION Guide http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=2183
This is just some Debian user with penis envy.
I know a few people that became developers. IMHO, it was too easy for someone who didn't know what they were doing to become a developer. Some of the horry stories I've heard about broken packages and messed up permissions just confirms my feelings about Gentoo.
Whatever you do, don't let a Gentoo user start talking about emerge. They become as bad as Debian users that brag about apt-get.
Oh my god, I've been wasting my time all these years! What was I thinking? All those websites running off binary mod_php packages were useless!
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
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Same with those Mac OS X users.
No I'm not trolling... seriously, isn't "ricer" more of a derogatory term? What is it doing on the front page of /.
Oh, and while we're doing it, let's recycle stuff from like a year ago, mmmkay?
Clearly we have solved all other problems in the Linux community, and the most important thing we can do now is to mock the other guys distro.
At one point I thought the people who trashed Slashdot editors were wrong, lately, not so much.
So how exactly did you get gentoo running on openbsd you annoying wanker??
I bought a used microVAX hoping to run NetBSD on it... but alas, the instructions started with 'in VMS download the image and copy it to the tape drive...'*. erm... I have neither VMS nor a tape drive... I could mount the SCSI drives in my (Linux) PC, if I had any clue what to do after that.
*paraphrased
White americans have been modding American cars since the days of Henry Ford but we don't call them "potatoers" or whatever the staple white american food is.
According to american culture, at least, those whiteys would be referred to as "greasemonkeys", "gearheads", "rodders", etc. And, again according to American culture, it's becoming known as "pimping out" the car. Which is of course, very politically correct itself. Selling women as a commondity == improving a car.
Hey, did you know that in the vast majority of northern China, people don't eat rice?
Hey, did you know that the vast majority of Asian cars aren't from China? What the hell does that really have to do with anything? Do you even know where the motorsport slang term "rice" comes from?
Of course, they're all gooks and chinks to us, eh?
From the way you're flaming on, I am guessing you don't.
It came from some performance bike racers in Japan mixing their standard fuel with alcohol to help boost power in the small engines at high RPM. Some of them used alcohol distilled from rice wine, and thus caught the nickname of "rice burners". Because that's literally what they were doing. This was way more common 15 -20 years ago, these days it's fallen out of vogue as modern racing fuel mixtures either have methanol in them already, or are formulated to not need it.
Man I love ignorance.
To each their own. You certainly do seem to indulge in it, so...
Is it just me, or has this week been a REALLY bad week for slashdot? Editors are approving shit that isn't even news anymore. I'm about gone for good.
It's easy to point and laugh at the neighborhood kid with a Neon equipped with spoilers and excessive stickers (or in this case, a computer with overclocked CPUs and case windows), but really, what's the point?
... but bitching about someone's hobby, which they do for fun, is about as lame as you can get.
... so what's the fuss about?
Now, I can understand complaining about overly loud stereos booming down the street in the wee hours of the morning
Yeah, it may be "illogical." Yeah, it may be "a waste of time and money." But it's not your time, not your money, and quite obviously not your interest
If everyone would just use Win Xp like you should, then you wouldn't need to bitch and cry about people using different distros. P.S. I actually like MS.
Change it to linux in general and it would be just as true.
Gentoo of course has all the header files as everything is compiled from source. this doesn't make it faster, it just makes it a lot easier to install a new app wich hasn't yet made it into an rpm.
Yes mandrake is easy to use, far easier to use in fact then windows thanks to its very nice installer BUT it was so easy to use that I could learn all kinds of advanced stuff on it. Like compiling my own kernel to take advantage of my own hardware. I have a rather crappy Asus Dual P3 wich for some reason never works in dual mode with stock kernels. I always have to mess around with boot parameters until I roll my own.
If you then roll your own php and mysql because you want to see the beta's and be prepared with knowing the new features when they reach production well. It is just a short step to just roll your own.
There are probably other distros out there that I could use but I will probably never go back to RPM, it is nice if you never want to bother with compiling but to me that is not a bother.
But making harmless and not so harmless fun of other distros is all part of the fun of using linux. There is so much choice available and people have this in build need to defend their own choice that conflict is inevitable. Some people take it to far but that is just part of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I hate to plug my own shit but here's my whole take on the Gentoo-bashing stuff. To make a long story short, Linux distros are like punk bands - the hardcore (lame) punk fans only like a band until it makes it big. Once that happens they turn their backs on it and find a less paletable, more obscure group.
Screw em'. Let them be fucktards if they want to. I use Gentoo because it's easy. I'm lazy and it works every time - in a predictable way. The product is great, the forums are great, and if I run any other distro it's because I am in a time crunch or because it's at work and people will only sign off on Redhat. To me, distros boil down to the package managment and the community support. Gentoo excels in both areas.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
I am a Gentoo user, and I am always looking for better distros. I recently tried Debian and Fedora Core, and managed to mess up Fedora Core in a day, and dropped Debian because of no XOrg 6.8.1.
What i want is a distro wich at least:
- Lets you customize your kernel
- Has the latest software available
- Has NO major dependency problems (currently I think Gentoo is the best at this point)
- Is based on (i686) binaries. (no waiting for software compiling)
- Has automatic hotpluging that asks you if you want to mount/take an action when something is plugged in (KDE compatible)
- Has a programmed installer (not bash)
- Has all quirks well documented. (configuration files and so on)
- Starts up as fast as possible, and scales well with sevral services
I have not found any distros better than Gentoo so far.As the parent said, if you blow all your money on shit like rims, stickers, wing, exhaust tip, etc...then your a ricer.
However, if you build up the powertrain (tweak the engine to perform past its intended rating), then I would call that same Honda a "Nip-Rod". Of course, starting with the Nissan Z by popularity in the 70s, they were often called "Pocket Rockets".
Life is not for the lazy.
Just asking for a bunch of flame posts it seems. Gentoo has a great package system and a great community (especially the Gentoo Forums which has helped a lot through many problems for many distributions, hell do a search, it's better than google, heh). Granted there are those few fanatics (so do all distributions and OS's), this really doesn't help anyone but try to discredit Gentoo users as a bunch of idiot teenage kids. I think the many posts here already sums everything up.
First my bias: I'm a Debian user.
There are far to many gentoo fanboys that have simply discovered Linux through Gentoo (which is a good thing) that assume it is the greatest thing since sliced bread (a bad thing).
I'd suggest to them to give an honest attempt at another distro (Debian Sarge Plug). Then go back to Gentoo if they really thing it is the best for them.
Personally, I can't imagine compiling gentoo for each server, or even manging different binary sets for various CPUs, kernels are more then enough for me.
but that's just my $0.02 cdn
Probably one of the saddest developments in America in the last few decades is the way "abuse humor" has replaced the real thing -- more and more seems to be about making fun of other people, putting them down, and claiming this is funny. I realize that insulting people is easier than displaying real talent, but still. It is sad to me as an American that the best English-language comedians by far and wide today seem to be Brits, while we're paying "shock jocks" milions to spew garbage that wouldn't be allowed on any well-run playground.
What is even more depressing is the complete lack of self-irony in these pieces. Take Monty Python's song "Never Be Rude To An Arab", where the singer makes fun of himself more than anybody else -- these are the masters, go snivel at their feet. "Fawlty Towers" has an episode where all they do is make fun of Germans ("Never mention the war!") but it is done so well that even my German friends can laugh, because John Cleese makes such a complete ass out of himself, too. Eddie Murphy has lots of abusive humor in his stand-up pieces, but he is the first to make poke fun of himself. At least the guy from Jackass is sticking his own tongue in drainage pipes.
And sorry, I think "ricer" is a racest term. Obviously the Slashdot editors and a lot of people here don't agree, but I was pretty suprised to see this article promoted here. Hope they don't get into trouble with OSTG.
So: It is not funny, it offers no insight, and uses racist language for what seems to be its own sake. Even if it has the word "Gentoo" in it and it is a slow day, I fail to see what this is doing on the front page of Slashdot. Me, I'll stick with reruns of the Soviet Russia jokes, and -- and mod the original article down as "troll".
Gentoo Sparc is the only sparc distro that is up2date on the sparc cpu/platform. SuSE/Redhat dropped support. :(
So if you want Linux on your Sparc machine, Gentoo has the most up2date desktop and packages.
I've been using Gentoo Linux for 8 months now.
I would just like to say that it made me switch from Windows XP Pro to Linux.
I've used other linux distros over the past few years, but never really took linux to heart. I was able to compile programs and somewhat work with it and got around ok.
The linux distros that I did were binary based systems, just a simple point and click option. This didn't teach me anything, when I did try to build my own app and "make install" it, most of the time it didn't work or broke another application. There is another point.
When you build a app you have compile options "./configure". Lets take xchat for example. When you "install" xchat from a binary distro.. you get xchat, But with what options turned on or off? You have no idea what your getting besides the fact that its xchat.
Now with source based distros you have the option of turning on or off build options. Here is Gentoo's build options for xchat "debug ipv6 mmx nls perl python ssl tcltk xchatdccserver xchatnogtk xchattext" That is a lot of control over what you build.
Another big this is CFLAGS. These are very helpful for older systems, or you just want your programs to use every single feature of your 100-800$ cpu. With Binary distros most compile for i686. OK.. does that mean that gcc will use "mmx mmx2, sse sse2, 3dmow" ??? You have no idea what kind of optimizations you're getting.
I know some Gentoo uses go all out on there CFLAGS, but from what I've notice it makes building the app a lot longer, it just makes gcc try more things to build the apps.
I my self use "-O2 -mcpu=pentium4 -march=pentium4 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -ffast-math" I wouldn't call that "ricing" its just using all of what my system can do to make the apps run better.
And with Gentoo's emerge system, kind of hard to beat that. Yes apt-get is great, but there is alot of cool tricks that you can do with Gentoo's emerge system. http://gentoo-wiki.com/Emerge
Need help installing gentoo just ask around. Or you can find me in the irc irc2.othersideirc.net #rantradio
Ricenix: Too fast, too optimised!
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
1. Spot a funny website in the previous Slashdot frontpage funny story. Thanks to the Slashdot moderation system, it is easy finding one, since they are usually moderated +5, Funny.
2. Send your "scoop" to Slashdot.
3. Karma profit!
<SARCASM>
Yeah!! My wikid l33t tweaked out Compaq Deskpro XL (ya hear that? XL, baby!) 575 with a case window dremmelled into it, all the heatsinks swapped to copper, spraypainted white with two blue stripes down the side, a TURBO button added back (yeah, baby! Turbo! it makes the fans go faster by switching them to 12V and turns on a bunch of blue LEDs!), with the Pentium overclocked to a whole 80MHz and lots of cold cathodes, runs Gentoo compiled from stage1 with CFLAGS="-march=i586 -O9 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math -funroll-loops -funroll-all-loops -funsafe-optimizations"!!!
I even put a spoiler on the top, and, you know, holes for more airflow, and chrome n stuf!! Because more airflow always means kewl!
It's almost as wikid as my mate's wikid car!!
OMGLOLWTFBBQ!!!11!11
</SARCASM>
Seriously, I've used Gentoo for servers. I needed pretty high performance and very very good security on a quad Opteron 250 (2.4GHz, Tyan Thunder K8QS Pro, 16GB ECC ram, quad Cheetah 15K.3 drives in software RAID-5 of 3, with 1 hotspare) box I administer, and my life wouldn't be on the line if it went down (hence RAID-5 not RAID-1, and so on; and if it's software, just serial console in and pick it back up again).
It's a surprisingly good choice, if you have special needs[1]; Gentoo Hardened 2.6.x with PaX & grsecurity (a tough patch for the latest 2.6 kernels, especially in amd64; it didn't apply cleanly so lots of careful dev work needed), strongly encrypted partitions using a custom device mapper plugin, reiser4 (a trifle bleeding-edge, I realise, but rock solid so far), custom kernel patches and some changes to GCC. It wasn't an easy thing to do and I can understand questioning the point, but it was fun and it's a very, very, very speedy and unique box.
It's definitely possible to screw up easily (especially while doing etc-update), and I'm not terribly happy about them not digitally signing the portage tree for emerge sync (done manually every time a GLSA affecting me comes out), but administered with care and with appropriate babysitting it's great. Definitely not everyone's distro, though; that's its strength as well as its weakness.
[1] No, I don't mean "retarded" by "special needs", although given the context of the discussion, you could read it that way in some circumstances. :)
Gentoo is NOT compile-from-source for performance, it's for customization. /usr/bin
:)
I use it a lot and it has grown on me, although what does bother me is the mass amount of files in
Oh well.
he demonstrated by A plus B minus C divided by Z that the sheep must be red, and die of the rot
Well yeah -- if you remember how often one Slashdotter's flamebait is often another's plain truth. In this case, the point of comparison is the Ricer -- an exercise in pure technological ego. A lot of people (including me) find that sort of thing supremely irritating. But the suggestion that many Linux diehards have the same mentality is not far off the mark. Linux nerds (and other kinds of techno-nerds as well) often seem to like the technology for its own sake. Nothing wrong with that, but that means accepting that the picture the nerd projects to the outside world is just a little weird. Worth remembering, no matter what drum you march to.
Oh sorry, i forgot: Support for my Hauppage Win-TV Nova DVB-S card.
i rather have a 1969 Mustang Mach 1 with a 429 Cobra Jet under the hood...
show those ricers what horse power really is all about...
Bitter irony? Possibly painful truth, guessing from your mod score...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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First off, I'm a SuSE USer, and have been since v6.4. My problem is that I have very little time to fiddle around, with SuSE (just upgraded to 9.2) is really easy to hand to someone else, insert DVD, point & click. So, even with teh absolute beginner it's not scary.
;-).
;-)
Having said that. I myself occasionally stray and do a complete rip-n-replace of my workstation (when I finally find the time), and Gentoo is next on my list (which also features Debian and Slackware - going full circle as I started long ago with Slack on floppies
What I recommend to others should be what suits them, not what my preferences dictate. But I've given up on RedHat. Maybe Fedora, but for my friends (and that includes business) RH is not worth recommending if you've ever used SuSE.
And yeah, support is ESSENTIAL - communities are IMO *good* things even though it's for some a culture shock
Insert
I find about two thirds of supposedly hillarious USE flags commentary serious, correct and insightful.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
There is one value of Gentoo that I think many people tend to overlook. While many seem to focus on Gentoo's ability to let the user specify optimization flags and build a system from scratch for performance reasons, I adore Gentoo's ability to use packages that are plainly newer than what most other distributions could hope to offer, especially with what one can get from using breakmygentoo's packages.
Unlike loading my system with an absurd quantity optimization flags, I run my system with just a stable "-O -g." This has allowed me to commit a large number of very complete bug reports--and I mean over one hundred--for many projects--e.g., Gnome, Mozilla, and KDE--in the past year-and-a-half.
What's more is this: I cannot begin to describe how annoying it is on standard, binary-package distributions to go about using and developing for newer software suites and manually having to deal with bleeding-edge dependencies that these distros would never include end up including for a few months, due to their instability.
I am fine with their potential instability on Gentoo; at least I do not have to go about uninstalling nearly all of distro's Gnome's dependencies and rebuilding them from scratch and dealing with very strange conflicts between the distro's older components and the manually installed newer packages.
If I am not believed, wait two months from now, take a fresh Debian or Fedora install, and attempt to compile the development version of Gnome against it without seriously damaging or fudging the distro's packaging mechanism and dependency system. I can attest that this is one virtue that Gentoo has over nearly every distribution that I have used, in that it minimizes the aforementioned dependency and package hell; and believe me: I have used a wide variety of distros in the past seven years, and only Gentoo has pleased me so well. Granted Gentoo does have its problems, but I have not stuck with a single distribution like it for such a long time, since I had been using Slackware and god-forbid, FreeBSD.
On another note, if some want to claim that the packages contained in Gentoo's portage tree are not bleeding edge, I can say that I personally maintain a rather large, manually created portage overlay that contains numerous unofficial packages. The fact that these packages can be compiled uniformally, installed consistently, and removed with ease is wonderful and something that I would dare not do with another distribution.
Even the Politburo concurs with Process of Elimination http://process-of-elimination.net
mmm???
With crap like this making it to the front page... I'm starting to wonder if it isn't just fucking worth it to cull a million other news sources myself and pick out the geek.
This was crap. This was old. This was _stinky crap_.
Did we forget the 'stuff that matters' portion? Come on.
Yes, that's an excellent idea. Let's do exactly that!
I think that alot of people are missing the point of the site, which is that it's supposed to be funny.
i've linked to that page from my blog over 6 months ago. what slashdotter DOESNT know about it?
old news.
Those who mock Gentoo users like this are fools.
It's a sad fact snobbery afflicts Linux geeks as badly as it does other people groups.
Regarding that foolish article, other Linux newbies (that use distros) could easily have similar questions and flawed assumptions.
The process of compiling software into a distribution used to be the last "closed" aspect of the Linux movement. Things like Gentoo helped solved that problem.
Yesterday I was browsing for the source of some software I was trying to install (this was the "Ogg Vorbis Direct Show Filters" that allow Ogg files to play in Windows Media Player), and I found that the released binary was two point versions ahead of the CVS version. i.e. No source existed for something many people thought was open source. (As it turns out, the copyright owner may not have released the source for that version). If this had happened for Linux software, instead of Windows software, Gentoo users would be the among first to notice and discuss that.
Go Gentoo!
[I've never used Gentoo.]
The file share my boss had on his workstation labelled "Die white people" got attention, I can tell you....
;-)
Why? That's German for "The white people." Talk about ignorance.
For those of us who are not too swift when it comes to programming.
....ing KDE clock would never show the right time in Red Hat."
Is it more productive to: wait for gnome bugs to be squashed; a kernel that that can deal with them without crashing; just run xfce?
"I essentially started using Gentoo because my
was my favorite.
It's all about styling, placebo's wont as well.
...who become the butt of a joke, it can be funnier if you play up to that joke as convincingly as you can, don't take it to heart.
But, BOT, I just want to say I like my Slackware binarys better. Just knowing I got them right from the developer lets me know theres no hidden agendas going on, thus giving me the feeling everything is exposed and "low level".
Nothing like a gentoo bashing article to bring them all out of the wood work. I am surprised they are soo noisey.
-fomit-instructions
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
...these kids with the riced out neon take part in street races which can lead to the death of themselves and/or innocent bystanders.
There was a case in Birmingham a few years ago when two guys racing down a city street plowed into a queue of people outside a nightclub (Dome 2) killing four of them.
I am NaN
i can only join forces with so many here. it's _very_ old (there was a post in gentoo otw forum half a year ago or so) and it's really not a very good comparison.
A lot of VAXen are netbootable - you run some combination of dhcp, rarpd and mopd on another box (eg your Linux PC), and get the boot image across that way.
I got my VaxStation3100 up and running this way. I'm sure it's in the NetBSD install docs somewhere if you search for netboot...
TTFN,
Tim.
Intel should start selling 2 or 3ghz i386s
Intel already sells processors with the same instructions-per-clock as the i486. They're called "Pentium 4".
Yup. Things I would never have discovered were I using some other distribution that didn't expose me to these things.
Where's my NetBSD disc?
Gentoo is nice, but I wasted my time. Binary packages are great because I didn't have to wait for the damn thing to compile. Optimizing to the hilt is only necessary if you really need too and most of the comments on that page sound like comments you'd see on MacRumors when the latest security patch comes out:
I applied the latest security patch from Apple and my Powerbook seems to have more zip.
If your Gentoo:
The just released a new package for X11 (4.3.9 up from 4.3.8) and I spent all night compiling it and it just seem so much faster then 4.3.8!
It's ridiculous. I have better things to do then compile X11 4-5 times a month or year depending on how fast the new packages come out just so I can gain 1 fps in a game or whatever.
Granted, if you actualy and really need that extra performance, then it's worth it (say if your working on embedded or other types of constrained platforms).
Gorkman
I think thaqt page is funny shit. If you can't laugh at your own kind, you don't really have the right to laugh at anyone. I like to think that I use Gentoo because I know what I'm doing and Gentoo gives me a bit more control over exactly how my box is built, while still giving me enough package management to not have to go through the pains of real DIY from plain sources. But at the same time, I've often joked with freinds about how ridiculuous it is that I often end up spending 6 hours compiling software that I could've downloaded in binary form in 5 minutes, and the net result is like 17 seconds of saved CPU time over the course of the next month or two, at which point I'll be re-compiling that package again anyways.
11*43+456^2
Was this at all necessary? I mean, why put a link to site designed solely to troll the bejeebus out of people using a particular distro? Yes, I use Gentoo - and yes, I love it. Having shit like this frontpaged on /. is just another derogatory stab at the supposed elitistic Gentoo community, which in turn will have some devotees coming forth defending and making sad apologies all over the place.
Why should they(and me included, it seems) be forced to defend a Linux based distro on a Sunday afternoon; is M$ Winblows bashing passé, all of a sudden? Direct the force of loathing where it will do some some good, and not internally!
Skip the tequila shots next time, Michael!
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
I have a question. I'm a gentoo user, and I tried it because of the rumors that portage was better than the BSD port system. However, I find that the rumors are completely wrong, so I don't understand the praise portage is getting.
I've had tons of problems with it, and I KNOW how it works. God help the uninitiated. I don't think it's worth going into all the different instances right now, but let me summarize my question.
What's so great about an imitation ports system, that is so incredibly complex that it's borderline impossible for mere mortals to maintain or modify as needed, and that insists on installing new kernel sources before it will allow you to upgrade Mozilla (just because you happen to have rsync'd recently)?
Not a troll or flame. I'd like to hear some rational answers to explain this paradox.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What is this?
I must say I'm very disappointed in Slashdot for publishing this crap AND in the part of the slashdot community who is supporting this kind of rant.
It's not funny at all!!! The Gentoo community is doing their best to get industry recognition and with success. This is a straight smack in the face for gentoo!
Besides that, don't you understand you put the whole open-source community in a "divide and conquer"-situation?
What's even funnier, rather than let the humor be (and unless you're one of the people mocked, you have to admit and know that there are those users in the Gentoo community, albeit they are not exclusive members of the gentoo world..) what really cracks me up are the rebuttals. They know it's not "faster" (start listing off some examples if you have them, I'd like to measure the performance increase of a running application) It's easy to talk but I'd like to see some real world numbers on a running application.
It's just funny. Let it be that. Even if that percieved 0.01% humor improvement is imagined, I still think it's funny.
I gather it involves bolting crap to your car, which I think is a right guaranteed in the constitution somewhere, but is there a more precise meaning than this? Is there some nominal Japanese connection?
Also, wtf is an 'R-type sticker'?
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
If you're running gentoo and you're not recompiling your kernel at boot you're just a poser!
Looks like that site now has a *lot* more ricer posts to put up. Thanks /. !
[Disclaimer: I use Gentoo and use t3h b3st flagz evah: CFLAGS="-O299 -fgo-really-really-fast -fround-off-all-numbers -fpi-is-exactly-three -march=pentium4 -mcpu=pentium4 -mprocessor=pentium4 -mcomputer=pentium4 -lead -pipe -b4 -cu -fu -omg" )
This is a sig. Deal with it.
We've all seen it. It's lame.
Poster should be -modded for TROLLING, flamebait.
Please don't feed the trolls.
YOU FUCKING FAIL IT!
If I wanted to be TRULY efficient, I probably wouldn't use Gentoo. It takes like 2 days to install a system. Maybe that's because I'm very slow at following instructions.
Gentoo portage is cool because it has a HUGE repository of applications, and it resolves dependencies. But then again, so do many other package systems like apt-get.
I switched to Gentoo because I have friends whose use it. I wanted to migrate from Red Hat because it didn't support my new hardware, and I had trouble with Fedora Core 2 not having bootable CD's. I could have gone with plenty of other distros and been happy too. I just enjoyed the time-consuming experience of installing Gentoo, messing it up completely, and getting it done right the second time.
I like Gentoo because I don't NEED to use a distro-custom kernel. Some distros, like Red Hat, don't like vanilla kernels (at least, I had some trouble with it, but I'm kinda dense). On the other hand, I wish portage would pay attention to kernel options and emerge the corresponding user-space utilities automatically.
Anyhow... what it comes down to is the reason I chose Gentoo is because I'm stubborn, zealotous, and kinda stupid. That's what makes me so more brilliant and humbler than everyone else.
But, really, it's just snobbery.
That said, I'm still reading the article (gotta love livin' in the counry and that great 28.8 connection!). And snickering
Have fun, y'all.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I use Gentoo, not because of the 2% speed boost (although it is faster than mandrake), but because of portage. Portage has almost everything, and it just works! I can get the same amount of control over my system from debian or something, but with over 100,000 packages Gentoo just saves me the trouble of going through dependency hell or tracking down packages/source code tarballs. The time it takes to compile on my system is minimal (except on kde!) so it just makes life easy.
Try 'emerge -U mozilla' rather than 'emerge -U world'. That should work unless for some odd reason mozilla's dependencies include an updated kernel.
Please tell us you didn't mean "A kind of bread". Please. Maybe you like to count using roman numbers. But don't tell us you meant "A kind of bread".
It is apparent that you do not "KNOW" how it works.
If portage insisted that you install new kernel sources before upgrading Mozilla, you probably gave it the wrong upgrade instructions. To check this theory, I ran 'emerge mozilla -pv', and checked the dependencies. Even though I'm running a 2.4 kernel (and not the latest), it didn't want to install any kernel sources.
There is no paradox here. Portage is not designed to be a fool-proof system. It is designed to be powerful enough to do what you want, without being overly complex. If you want fool-proof, I hear YaST (from SuSE) is good. If you want power, learn to leverage the portage system's abilities. If you're having trouble with it, just ask (in a nice manner), and the Gentoo community will likely be very willing to help.
http://wrongknowledge.com/computers/ricer/
It's da shizzle
because: it's humor. and it *is* funny. not snort-earl-gray-through-my-nose funny, but a chuckle.
second: i'm only passingly familiar with Gentoo, so the story and the comments have given me a flavor of why i might want to try it someday. for instance, to make a minimal-footprint build on an old, cramped laptop or something. the experiment could be good humor, too.
for the record, i'm a Slackie... Slackware never surprises me. and that is good.
Does any other distribution make it easy to run two version of kde? Stable and raw-from-cvs from the kdm login prompt? Debian doesn't. Gentoo does, and does well. I need this ability.
The gentoo forums are almost a pleasure to read. There is an almost total lack of feelings of entitlement. The questions are 'how do I fix this' rather than 'why haven't you fixed this yet?'.
Derek
Gentoo has forced everyone to maintain adequate build systems for their software.
It lowers the barriers for people to start poking around in the source code.
It is a good training ground for developers.
It is truly open source. You see it compiling when you install. Binaries are nice but they put a distance between user and source code.
Derek
... comparing an ancient PC laptop with a Mac laptop running OSX. And saying the PC was slightly faster (probably for day-to-day tasks?). It makes you a non-zealot Mac user - a rare breed on /.
If that is apparent to you, then your judgement is completely screwed up, because that's not true.
First of all, mozilla was just an example. Second, your test is complete bullshit. If you have no idea what version of mozilla I started from, no idea what version of the kernel I am using, etc, then you can't possibly just test it that easily.
Now, I thought my original point was clear, but since two posts have already completely misunderstood, allow me to clarify.
The main problem I have with portage, is that it only checks if you have the latest (stable) version of a dependency installed. This problem spirals out of control, because of dependencies of dependencies of dependencies.
So, if the version of the kernel you are using is no longer the latest after an upgrade, and you install a program that depends on a second program, that depends on the kernel sources, then portage will insist on dowloading the latest version of the kernel.
If you want to test this out, make sure you don't have the latest stable version of the kernel sources installed, and then emerge a program that depends on something like alsa.
This is not a question of "a fool-proof system", it's a question of portage being dumb enough that it requires the admin to spend a lot of time tracking down, and manually resolving bugs, conflicts, and other limitations of portage.
And besides this, the specifics aren't really important, it's a question about portage in general, not "what did I do wrong".
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
NVI is a good minimialistic vi [...] unless your a dirty dirty emacs hippy
Sweet! Now we've brought editor religion into the distro war article. Next I'd like to see a little grammar cop action, followed by some media-is-too-liberal vs media-is-too-conservative bickering. For the main event, frothing fundamentalist Randites can instruct us all in how to pronounce Ayn, while carefully being snotty enough that they can't be accused of being unselfish. Then, when everybody tries to shout them down, somebody can end the thread by making Nazi comparisons.
Get to it, boys! Time's a-wastin'!
You say "The process of compiling software into a distribution used to be the last "closed" aspect of the Linux movement. Things like Gentoo helped solved that problem."
/usr/src/REDHAT/ and look at and modify the sources, and there is a .spec file that specifies where the binary will go and compilation options and etc. You can modify those and make your own RPMs to install; I have done this with Postgres and PHP, when the distributed RPMs for a certain redhat release were out of date.
./configure ; make ; make install
That is not true. You have always been able to figure out how a package was built. In slackware, install the source package and there is the original tarball Patrick downloaded, a patch file for any changes, and a script that has all the commands he ran to build it. You can modify it and make it your way -- I have done this, to add newer features to MC that were released as patch files after the slackware release, for example.
In an RPM based distribution you against install the source package; you can do everything automatically using rpmbuild, or just install the package and go into
The point of all this jeering at the gentoo guys, is that they are mostly newbies who arrived at gentoo by not learning Redhat or Slackware well enough to do what they immagined they needed to do, and they just desparately installed different distributions until one of them gave them the appropriate feeling of eliteness.
For example, the average gentoo user doesn't know how to make his own ebuild to create a package of his own, or use different features in a source tree, etc. They install things using "emerge" which downloads and builds in one step, not pausing for you to tweak the source tree to install it your way. And you can be fairly certain that they will never learn -- if they need the --with-wiz-bang feature on some package, they will scream to the gentoo maintainers, and when that fails, start installing every CD set on distrowatch until they find the one that does it for them.
These loud mouthed cheerleaders wouldn't recogize this if it would save their life:
Boy, you got your little, uneducated ass told, didn't you?
Now that was some funny shit, the replies putting you in your place. lol, dumbfuck.
I suppose I might be a bit biased, since I dropped $600 on an cat-back exhaust for my car this summer (95 240SX, A'PEXi N1 Dual); along with the intake and header, it definitely added a bit of power; even a $50 autozone coffee-can muffler should theoretically give you a small bit of power. Of course the ricer twits think that that alone is the only engine mod you need to have m4d p0w3r, totally ignoring the rest of the tuning and parts required to get the real benefits of a high-flow exhaust (next step for me is cams and a chip, just need to scrape up the cash first).
I left the silencers in on my exhaust, but even without them it's only a bit louder than stock, and keeps a nice deep throatiness...no angry bumblebee for me. Of course, the large-for-a-4cyl. 2.4L displacement helps; a 1.6 liter honda engine is going to be whiney no matter what you do to it. Nor a body kit or ginormous rear wing; i did spring for 17" wheels, but those do give quite a handling improvement with wide tires, plus they look decent....
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
By "abusive humor" you mean humor that is close to or is the truth? Maybe this was done by a Gentoo fan pointing out the absurdities of Gentoo community, and is comparing them to people who think by adding noisy fart pipes and stickers to their shitty car adds to the cars performance, and makes them look smart.
So maybe what we have here is the failure of people to tell when something is poking fun at them, or being able to take a joke about themselves. I seems some people here need to clam down, and not be so easily offended. If it not humor and is a real troll, just ignore them or not get so worked up about it.
Here's a reason to use Gentoo: Awesome support.
Gentoo has the best user community I've seen for linux. Their forums have never made me feel stupid for asking stupid questions. The people there have been so nice to me that I've actually turned back and helped other people with their problems whenever I could. Apart from all the other great features of Gentoo, it is always nice to know that if anything goes wrong, you're not alone with the problem and there's others actively working to help you out.
Back when I was moving to a new distro every week, it was the warmth in the community that made me wanna use Gentoo.
Just my two cents.
Using -O3 can really boost some applications. Especially small and CPU intensive ones. I compiled the Unix Amiga Emulator two times. The first time with -O2, the second time with -O3. The 680x0 emulator (processor) performed 1.4 times better with -O3. I didn't measure the compile time, but it was a lot longer with -O3.
Debian <--> VW bus
Red Hat <--> new Chevy Celebrity
Fedora <--> old Chevy Celebrity you got from your parents
MacOS 9 <--> Honda Civic
MacOS X <--> Honda Civic
OpenBSD <--> Volvo
Windows <--> Pinto
Find free books.
What is so offensive about ricers.
I for one find them hilarious.
Who can take a civic
A rusty old DX?
Add a giant spoiler and some plastic ground effects?
The ricer man can
the ricer man caaaaan!
My apologies to Sammy Davis Jr.
Welcome to last week. Honestly, it is such an old (yet funny) site, that i dont see why this made the front page. Might as well put an All-Your-Base article on the front page.
:(){
Paluminum.net
I used one today to mush up some boiled eggs.
I've used one recently to make mashed potato(e)s.
Why do I want to put my linux distro through one, or even compare my linux distro to one?
A confused cook.
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
I like to think my Gentoo installation is like a German sportscar. I think around BMW M5.
Distro Elitism does not server any beneficail purpose. It only serves to generalize and then demean people.
If you have contributed to open source, then you should be proud of what the movement has accomplished. There are many different programs, tools and distrobutions that people can choose from. People will use what works for them.
If use open source, then you should be greatful that you have this massive resource at your disposal.
If you don't, it'll sneak out at night and put undercarriage lights on your car.
Don't all those context switches slow you down?
when you say john wayne uses gentoo, but in actuallity everyone knows he uses slackware.
8 &c id=10672606
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=12775
lose != loose
I always thought this was a good overview, and directly addressed some misconceptions about Gentoo. Regardless, people that don't care won't get it, but that's fine; Gentoo isn't for everyone, that's why there are lots of distros out there.
Personally I've learned more by using Gentoo than from any other Linux. YMMV.
CB)#@$@
free ipod and free gmail!
Nyah nyah... I did a Stage1 install :-P
Clickety Click
I've been saying this for a while now... Gentoo, like BSD, will travel down the road to oblivion.
Who gives a crap.
Awesome!
There is a nice tool out there to make sure to pick the right optimizations for your specific algorithm:
http://www.coyotegulch.com/products/acovea/
This link not only provides you with a genetic algorithm to pick the right options but also explains some of them which seems to be a good thing now that I've read some of the comments.
Oh, on this page you can find something about gcc myths and facts, sounds like a good read for some of the gentoo users:
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/730/
I never wasted too much time optimizing my apps on a desktop PC, but I had to write assembly once to get the required performance on a real time system. Damn, does it make a difference if your code runs 20usec faster if you only have 660usec to process one block of data. Notice however, that human beeings aren't able to experience that kind of difference if it comes to application response times. I'm obviously exaggerating the issue a bit, but the message is, don't waste your time with that, go out and meet some people instead.
i think the term "ricer" in the context of someone who like cosmetic changes in pretense of something better can be applied to many linux "users" in general. I write and debug Linux drivers, so I would like to think I know a bit about Linux. And like most real Linux experts I know, we don't care to spend too much time on making our desktop all sparkle and shine with blinding colors with the lastest version of GNOME or KDE.
But the majority of young linux users out there spend most of their time on cosmetic setups on their environment to make their desktop look cool as suppose to use Linux for real work. They go around and proclaim how great Linux is, but really, all they know is how to modify desktop themes. This give them an illusion of being technical, and I can only imagine how compiling Linux src code make them even more hyped up.
But really, lots of Linux ricers out there, not just Gentoo.
...is the one behind the wheel. This is just as true with computers as it is with cars.
I run gentoo on 5 of my systems. Not because spending 10 hours compiling saves me 3 seconds at runtime. But because I am too lazy to manually install all the latest unstable packages. Do I absolutely need to be running version 0.99.4.1.3-rc17 beta? I probably don't, but that's not for anyone to decide but me.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Amen. Personally I haven't had that many huge problems, but on some machines (but not others with the same installed packages - yes it's that random) alsa-driver is considered a dependency of alsa-libs, which is not right. Since I am using 2.6 kernels only, and alsa-driver is only really useful for 2.4, I injected the ebuild as if it was done already, then carried on normally.
Almost a month later, a new alsa-driver comes out, and it wants to upgrade. For this, it must also fetch and install kernel sources (boy did this have me stumped - I didn't realise the alsa-driver connection at the time) for 2.4, which isn't useful to me at all. In the end I had to add the packages.provided entry by hand to convince the system alsa-driver was taken care of, but I know things will crop up again
More than half of portage's functionality is to work around its shortcomings. Not to mention the same 'untested' software that is in Portage and breaks instantly but works perfectly in FreeBSD Ports, NetBSD pkgsrc, OpenBSD Ports, etc... and certainly all binary distributions... how do they explain that?
Sam ty sig.
Actually AMF hasn't owned Harley since '86, the AMF bikes were the worst quality Harleys ever made, and knowledgeable harley shoppers avoid them like the plague. AMF didn't rescue Harley Davidson either, they almost ran them into the ground farther. AMF didn't know shit about manufacturing internal combustion engines, let alone motorcycles, and ramped production up high, and quality went down; a small group of investors bought the company back in the late eighties and focused on the retro appeal of the bikes and brought the production rate down, but the quality back up, these are the people that rescued HD. Now HD is a very successful American company that makes more money off of licensing their name to be put on other products than the sales of their own motorcycles. Harley Davidson bikes, excluding the AMFs, also hold their resale value extremely well compared to other motorcycles.
I do believe that Buell also had the fastest production bike made in the mid to late nineties, until Suzuki's Hayabusa came along.
grep -iw skynet
Thanks AC - your post was quite informative.
/usr/src/REDHAT/ and look at and modify the sources, and there is a .spec file that specifies where the binary will go and compilation options and etc. You can modify those and make your own RPMs to install; I have done this with Postgres and PHP, when the distributed RPMs for a certain redhat release were out of date.
./configure ; make ; make install
From the Gentoo site, it seems to have made several tasks easier than before (As I said, I haven't used it). Their page I was reading
The jeering is still offensive and wrong.
Quoting your post in full since it's zero-ranked:
You say "The process of compiling software into a distribution used to be the last "closed" aspect of the Linux movement. Things like Gentoo helped solved that problem."
That is not true. You have always been able to figure out how a package was built. In slackware, install the source package and there is the original tarball Patrick downloaded, a patch file for any changes, and a script that has all the commands he ran to build it. You can modify it and make it your way -- I have done this, to add newer features to MC that were released as patch files after the slackware release, for example.
In an RPM based distribution you against install the source package; you can do everything automatically using rpmbuild, or just install the package and go into
The point of all this jeering at the gentoo guys, is that they are mostly newbies who arrived at gentoo by not learning Redhat or Slackware well enough to do what they immagined they needed to do, and they just desparately installed different distributions until one of them gave them the appropriate feeling of eliteness.
For example, the average gentoo user doesn't know how to make his own ebuild to create a package of his own, or use different features in a source tree, etc. They install things using "emerge" which downloads and builds in one step, not pausing for you to tweak the source tree to install it your way. And you can be fairly certain that they will never learn -- if they need the --with-wiz-bang feature on some package, they will scream to the gentoo maintainers, and when that fails, start installing every CD set on distrowatch until they find the one that does it for them.
These loud mouthed cheerleaders wouldn't recogize this if it would save their life:
I ran Gentoo for a short time on one of my PCs, reformatted and put Slackware back on, and Slack loaded up quicker and everything ran faster. Hmmmm,
;] Old, but quick!
Slackware must be like my 1968 Mustang
So which is easier:
Hint: It's not the second one.
HAND.