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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...'"
It's just a collection of people saying stupid things on the the Gentoo forums. And for the record, I run Gentoo, but NOT for most of the reasons the people quoted say they do.
For some reason I've liked Portage much more than Debian's apt-get, whatever Red Hat uses (the name escapes me now) is just broken, and as for the others, just about none of their package management systems are nearly as good as Debian/Gentoo's, so I won't be touching them for a while. For instance, I'd like to see a list of packages that need updating without going through all of them.
Gentoo's Bugzilla (mainly for ebuilds) is awesome. Just about every time I've had a problem, I can find a solution there. Yes, I'm saying that Gentoo's not perfect. It isn't. But at least I know it's getting better. Not sure if Debian has one, but the mailing lists sure are a pain to sift through...
Speed? I don't care. I've got a working system (AXP 2100+/512mb DDR333) right now. Sure, I have to wait for the new things I get, but I'd rather "emerge mplayer" instead of hunting for the binaries.
Sure, you might say "Go back to Debian". I'm used to Gentoo now, though. I might give it a try again if I'm given a good enough reason, though. I sure as hell hope the installer isn't as bad now as it used to be, though.
Being of the 5%...
:)
I've been using Linux since the pre-1.0 days. My first distro was SLS. Of the modern distros I've used (Debian, RedHat, Slackware, SuSE, Mandrake) Gentoo is the only one which has _never_ given me a dependency fight... and I've been using it as the ONLY OS on my entire home network for over a year. It _does_ have real-world advantages.
Then I discovered debian, and since it was the only system I could easily keep up-to-date (let's face it, in those days, most distros didn't easily upgrade), it kind of stayed on my HD. I don't know how many years passed (5-10?), and I'm still using debian, and I still haven't reinstalled (except once, when I replaced my old computer). I've come to the point where I don't want to waste my time using another distro, as debian "testing" is good enough for me.
I've never even tried gentoo, but I certainly recognize myself in the attitudes displayed there. Go on kids! Use gentoo for a while, then when you become bored of being ricers, try debian on a separate partition. If you have a broadband-connection, it will probably stick there. I honestly think it's the best path...
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
<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. :)
Please mod up. The strength of Gentoo isn't in the (particularly good) package system or even the (even better) 'USE' flags thing, but in their community. The Gentoo forums is perhaps the last place where you can ask a "n00b" Linux question and be answered promptly, with zero elitist bullshit attached. I liked the source distribution idea beforehand, but when i witnessed this i was sold.
For some reason it seems to draw in nice people...
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.]
Unfortunately that gift is also it's curse. I dropped by #gentoo a few months ago when installing it for the first time and you'll typically get 3-4 questions being worked through at any given moment. Not only is this a little confusing, but a lot of questions went unanswered because so much text was flowing through.
That said, it's definitely the first place I'd go for advice, it just needs some more non-n00bs to handle the influx.
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?
Originally coming from slackware (3.4 or smth back in '96 I think) I tried lots of things, always ending up again at slackware. Tried SuSE, Redhat, Debian and Mandrake. Some of them were very brief, didn't like Redhat at all, Mandrake was just to play with, but was way to limited. Ended up in gentoo, and after 2 years still there.
.26 was just out I think. The debian installer happily installed a 2.4.18 kernel, and if you check the changelogs between those 2 versions, you'll notice they fixed some pritty bad root-exploits between those versions. Then checked the SSH version - same prob... What the hell should I install as a firewall then? Ok - added the security-update source for debian, which fixed the ssh-problems, but what the hell are you doing if you promote as your default stable version a very-exploitable default-install? I'm not even starting about the config-file managment and their updates... Lost settings more than once there.. :(
Ran debian for +- a year, but really didn't have a good feeling with the system, it just sucks monkeyballs as a desktop machine... Sure - I used the latest unstable or even test, but the problem is - the "unstable" or "test" perfectly discribe their state, I personally had a lot of dependency problems, and when a new version of some software package was released, it took months before it was added. The stable is hopelesly old, ok - stable, but secure?? I recently installed it as a firewall (still running), so I thought stable would be best. At that time, in the 2.4 series, 2.4.24 of
Anyway - I don't like debian - but I can say WHY. This guy just ends up bashing on the users w/o any reason or arguments for "gentoo is bad". He does make gentoo-users look bad because they choose gentoo. Is gentoo bad then? Or is it simply bashing on a small minority inside the gentoo community (which certainly is there, I won't deny that), but which is in no way the whole gentoo community? The others choose their distrib simply cause they liked it and judged on that based on experiences - not on hear-say, but they all get the label of "ricer" like a big yellow star sewed on their clothes, simply because they choose smth a majority feels threatened by or doesn't like (whatever you choose, not gonna go into that-one here). Way to go to critisize a distro. If you do it, do it in a good way. My personal "hesitation" towards debian certainly had to do with how little doc or help I found while installing for the first time. The "doc" (or what it should represent) on the official site was pure garbage at that time. I came from slack, where you just put in a cd or floppy, it boots, and it installs, simple. First problem, where the hell are the installation cd's? I found "unofficial" cdimages, and finally gave one a try, afraid that I had someone's personal vision of a debian system on a cd, so not very sure about what was going to happen when I didn't use some official cdimages. Lateron found out that there weren't any official images - damn... Anyway - ended up installing, followed some instructions, and then the option came up to choose a package installer. It presented 4 choices or smth, dselect as the interactive, easy to use sollution and well - won't say much more than "it's a monster - RUUUUNNN!!!". Ended up reinstalling the whole system 4 times, after which I decided I would simply use apt-get to install separate packages.
This still wasn't really the biggest issue with Debian.. The biggest issue was - the users. Ohhh ooeee auch... What was this article about? Right, gentoo users. What users always have the same critics on gentoo? I have to say, I only heard "complaints" about gentoo by other linux-ers that were running eeh almost afraid to say - debian. But at that time that wasn't the problem yet, since Gentoo didn't exist yet. Well - as a starting debian-user, I ended up reading the oh-so confusing doc on the website (was written in the way a chicken would describe how to create and lay an egg - they just already know how to do it, but not to exp
I agree with you 100%! I can appreciate poking fun at Gentoo users, we are a funny bunch, however, i also find ricer to be a horrible racial slur. I am amazed that nobody ever seems to mention that. While it might not be such a bad term, and may even have legitimate origins (rice-alchohol based fuel), it still is a very derogative term that i've only ever seen used as an ethnic slur to marginalize people of an Asian descent.
I find the site extremely offensive, not as a Gentoo user, but as an Asian.