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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.
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
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!
... 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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 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.
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
I have nothing against Gentoo. It's the very vocal fanbase I have issues with
What vocal fanbase? Really, looking around here and on other places on the net, Gentoo is constantly attacked and bashed by people from all over, but I have almost never seen a "vocal fanboy" going on about Gentoo.
It is very strange that it is being attacked so vehemently, when Gentoo users do not attack others. Usually - everyone has their share of pimply teenagers that thinks it makes them alpha males to do such. But in Gentoo community, they seem very, very rare.
You must be thinking about Debian and Mac users. Great distribution and OS, but the people using them... I'd use either in a blink, but I don't really want to be connected to those people. Sadly, as especially Debian might really be the best distro around.
As for having a *big* fanbase, Gentoo has that. Which is one of their real strengths, really. You always get help, are never ever flamed for being a newbie or anything, just friendly helpfulness. Elitist fanboys take note.
Spine World
That's because they've mostly shut up by now. It isn't that long ago that whenever there was ANY distro discussion here, the Gentoo freaks would come crawling out of the woodwork, screaming "USE G3NT00, L0ZRS!" at anything that moved. And they'd show their embarrassing ignorance off, like the six-foot aluminium wing on your friendly neighbourhood ricer's car. Many of those quotes on funroll-loops are from just those discussions. Right here on Slashdot!
And actually, I don't think the comparison to "ricers" is as apt as to some of those so-called audiophiles. Some of the things those freaks will do to their hi-fi systems for sound improvements that are usually completely imaginary really tickle my laughbones.
At least imaginary performance bonuses from CFLAGS don't cost money.