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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."
Do you have to compile this thing first?
It's just a matter of "follow the directions" and you get a working system. Anyone who can't install Gentoo must be afraid to RTFM.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
mirror here
Won't Gentoo lose all of it's coolness factor if anybody who can click a mouse can install it?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Amoung nerds isn't it's noteriety due to its unearned reputation for speed? Didn't /. post a benchmark showing that its optimizations were overagressive, and that net performance suffered?
Actually, I about did an LFS install myself because I was very pissed off with the state of Linux package management. That's what caused me to finally stop siding with all the people that have never tried Gentoo and babble on about how it sucks because Gentoo users are ricers, etc.
I sat through a Stage 1 install for a few days with an open mind. When it came to, it was very fast. I can't at all say that it was faster than the Slackware install it replaced (though it felt so), but what really sold me on Gentoo was Portage. It took about a month after that for me to finish nuking all of my Slackware installs for a shiny new Gentoo cluster.
I am a gentoo user. I have done several text-based installs (duh), and gentoo is currently my desktop of choice. I do this not for speed, but for control of my system, and excellent package management. I also switched to gentoo to get more hands-on with linux. I can say now, that I don't really like the text install. It taught me a lot, but after doing one or two, the novelty wears off, and it allows for many careless errors. This development also means that many new users will be much more attracted to gentoo. If they began offering a comprehensive mirror of the most common, say, 2000 packages, it would easily be one of the best distributions. (yes, sometimes building from source is annoying, but portage and USE flags still rock).
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.