Slashdot Mirror
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...'"
The website is a joke, don't take it so seriously.
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"
It isn't the car or the money so much as the attitude. If you see someone driving like an idiot, being a hazard to themselves and all ground-bound life forms, it is more likely a kid in a Honda (or something similar) with a wing and oversized muffler than someone in a car with no wing and functional improvements.
...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.
Drive a rickety old toyota and use winme, eh?
So do most ricers. *badda bing!*
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
You might as well check out the Gentoo OPTIMIZBATION Guide http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=2183
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
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".
Yes, I mean riced out, not upgraded or modified - titanium bored-out gas pedal, racing seat, ripped up padding on the roof falling down, bolted on wing (that looked like it'd been made by someone in a high school shop class....), chrome rims(1 missing), wings, nitrous and R-Type stickers(!)
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
Do you realize that taking a single code for measuring the optimization performance is the stupidest thing on earth ? I've coded a few big mathematical projects, and -O3 gives a big *boost*, the code can run two to three times faster. Pickup random projects, compile then and measure. Not some fucking code with only *612* cycles. ***The optimization does *nothing* on small code bases***.