Slashdot Mirror
Graphical Gentoo Installer In The Works
JonLatane writes "Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain. And because of its "install system" (if it can be called that), it's notorious for scaring off potential users before they even get to try it. Well, that's all going to change, because there is a graphical Gentoo installer in the works. It can run with a dialog frontend that bears a striking similarity to Ubuntu, or for faster systems a GTK+ frontend is available."
I mod this story (Score:-1, Troll). "Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed." What? Because it's source-based? What's the disribution I'm using right now based off of, pixie dust?
I think most people are "scared off" because they don't have the 4 GHz computer with a gig of RAM required to compile the entire system under a couple days, and if you DO have a 4 GHz computer, a few -O3 and -funroll-loops optimizations aren't going to amount to much.
Gentoo is a really nice distro if you have the system for it, but stop with the silly arguments. A few optimizations aren't going to amount to much, and if you want to learn how to put a distro together read the LFS book.
Of late, whenever I do an "emerge -u system", I have to spend days firefighting the inevitable borkage.
That's, of course, assuming that the emerge completes at all. Invariably, ebuilds are not properly tested, and will fail halfway through leaving my machine in an even more spacked-up state than to begin with.
The only time this has ever happened to me on four Gentoo machines was when I did
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge -u foo
which is a Bad Thing to Do.
And then it takes eight bloody hours to install a new version of Firefox. Urgh.
emerge mozilla-firefox-bin is pretty quick.
I admit it, I was wrong. I was attracted to Gentoo because I thought it would make me l33t and cool.
That's not in the documentation; you've got to work that out on your own.
For example, where in the documentation does it mention starting /etc/init.d/famd at boot? (This will improve KDE's file monitoring responsiveness.) Does a user know to chmod his RTC? How to umask a vfat partition so that users can access it? How to setup multiple sound cards? How to set up your application sound server settings? How to enable the kernel laptop mode? How to setup power management runlevels? Which kernel modules need to be added to modules.autoload? How to make fonts appear cleanly and consistently?
A second major problem with Gentoo is the uncontrolled proliferation of USE flags. The vast majority of flags are for individual packages. A new user would be likely to completely miss the importance of configuring many of the higher level use flags.
Unfortunately Gentoo is plagued by naive users who believe that--just because they have a Gentoo system that boots--they are somehow empowered. The largest reason they feel that way is because their system is 'optimized' for their hardware. The truth is an ignorant user's CFLAGS are more likely to hinder his system's performance.
Gentoo is an incredible distribution; however, it has a long way to go in terms of usability. While I am excited at the prospect of a graphical installer, I hope that these larger issues can also be addressed. These issues are what make Linux difficult, and fun.
Gentoo, the ultimate geek distro and it still hasn't got its own /. icon.
For all intensive porpoises your a bunch of rediculous loosers
I'm sorry to say this to you, but real performance doesn't come from microoptimizations, but from the algorithms and data structures. I don't understand what on earth people smokes these days to think that a compiler switch is going to make gnome, kde, mozilla and openoffice suddenly less bloated and faster, and convert O(N^N) algorithms in O(1) or something.
Blantently false. Complexity analysis specifically carries an unspecified constant multiple. It is this constant multiple that optimizations tweak. You can get code that runs two, three, or four times faster with optimizations on the same algorithm. What you won't get are speedups related to a function of the data size.
In the case of gcc version 4, expect a significant constant time speedup for C++ code like, for instance, KDE and Gnome. I bet gentoo users will have gcc 4 before most other distros.
This is something that really pisses me off. As a Gentoo developer and user, I can't stand seeing these fanboys spouting this utter crap.
Watching GCC output scroll by will not teach you a damn thing about Linux. Doing a stage1 installation teaches you exactly two things:
Nothing else.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is completely full of crap. Also, there is no difference in a system compiled from stage1, and a system built using a stage3 tarball and GRP, then customized and recompiled. The only difference is that I can get a system up and running in an hour or so (only because of the kernel compile) and then I can use my system while I recompile with my specified USE flags, while the "stage1 is so 1337" asshats are still staring at a console of scrolling text.
While I definitely think that the Gentoo community is one of its greatest assets, I also firmly believe that these vocal minority of fanboys are one of its greatest liabilities.