I'll tell you what makes Gentoo an acceptable target of derision. Fanatics. People who become enraged beyond reason when their favorite tool is called into question. It's a Linux distribution, not a Holy Book. Which linux distribution you use has absolutely no bearing on what kind of a person you are. Yet many Gentoo users take any criticism of their Holy Distribution as personally as if someone had just, as you put it, kicked them in the nuts.
I mean, so what? It's just a Linux distribution. I've used over a dozen. At work I admin a dozen SuSE servers. Tell me how much SuSE sucks, I won't care. Using Gentoo doesn't make you cool. Not using it doesn't make you uncool. Here, I'll give you some more ammo, you can make fun of me: I watch Friends on TV, I run Windows XP at home, I used to work for Greenpeace. Take your pick, tell me how much Friends sucks, Windows sucks and Greenpeace sucks. I won't be hurt because those things aren't me! They are just things I watch, use, or did for a living.
I mean, how insecure do you have to be to take criticism of a Linux distribution personally?
Gentoo isn't a joke. It's a cool distribution. I spent literally weeks on end fiddling with it because it was fun. But even the people on the gentoo forums thought that funroll-loops.org was funny.
I'm not saying that literally 9 out of every 10 people who use gentoo is a ricer. It's a figure of speach, a humorous exageration. Anyone who wasn't hopelessly insecure could figure that out. If more people who used FreeBSD were like you, I'd be making fun of them, too. I like Linux, and I like gentoo, and people like you with your over the top hystrionics give both of them a bad name.
Peter Griffin - If you could have any woman in the world, who would it be? Quagmire - Taylor Hanson. Joe Swanson - Taylor Hanson is a guy.
[Pause] Quagmire - [Laughs] You guys are yankin' me. "Hey, let's put one over on old Quagmire." Peter - No, he's actually a guy, Quagmire. Quagmire - What? That's insane. That's impossible.
[Pause] Quagmire - Oh god. Oh my god. I've got all these magazines. Oh god.
Thank you. All these people with their "Oooh, look at the anal wiring job, what if you have to fix or move something?" were really starting to piss me off. Lazy and uninformed, what a winning combo. Goobers can't even tell the front of a rack from the back, and have no idea of the right way to wire either. They're the ones who's wiring ends up looking like a plate of spaghetti in a few years.
Yeah, because the cables in that winning system were all store bought - NOT! How hard is it to test a cable after you've terminated it to the exact length you need for the neatest, tidiest install possible? I used to do a lot of that, and I would have to re-terminate maybe one out of every fifty cables, it's not that hard.
If you want a really nice looking install, you need to terminate yourself.
You, my friend, are a perfect example of why I don't hang out on gentoo-server. You are a ricer. You know you're a ricer, and that's why the comments hurt so much that you started frothing at the mouth. If it weren't for people like you, I might still be using gentoo. Intelligent, non-fanatical people have no trouble praising the parts of something that deserves praise while still poking fun at the parts that deserve it.
Having/etc under version control is key in any place where multiple admins can work on the same machine. I learned this from the guy who taught me Unix, SCO Unix of all things (hey, remember when they were cool?!?) The rest of your comments are spot on, too.
As for how litle support a decent OS needs, I know that, you know that, most/.ers know that, I just wish most managers and CTOs knew that. CYA and all that.
Really? What company do you work for? I'd like to work there! How did you get your managers to okay that? Who do you go through for support? Where I work, it doesn't matter that we can support an OS ourselves, we still need a support contract to CYA.
Oh, that was a bad typo. Sorry. s/nig/big/ Stupid fingers.
I love gentoo! I love gentoo users, too. I just see too many people (here, not really in the gentoo forums, or mailing lists or IRC channels) who read a story like this and start to get all defensive and say things like "This guy must be moron for not being able to install gentoo!" Sometimes gentoo users seem just a tad full of themselves. As if watching cryptic compilation messages scroll by for hours has made them a linux expert overnight, and anyone who hasn't, isn't.
You can run whatever OS you want to, but if someone has criticisms after giving it a try, what's the ponit in just writing them off?
I pulled those numbers out of my ass. And I haven't been part of the gentoo community for years, when it first came out the zealots were pretty shrill and I saw a lot of really, really uninformed comments here and in other places around the net.
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I really like gentoo. Or maybe gentoo fanatics still take anything less than unconditional support as an outright attack. If you've been part of the gentoo community for long, you would know that gentoo supporters started the whole "gentoo user as ricer" meme, to make fun of the people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and just wanted to look cool. You've seen funroll-loops.org, right?
I will say that the ratio of hackerness to riciness falls off pretty quickly the further from the core gentoo community one gets. By the time one is in slashdot country, it may not be 1 hacker for every 9 ricers, but it's pretty close, IMO.
I swear, everyone here is getting to that line and getting so worked up they have to reply without reading the rest of the comment. And here I'd promised myself I wasn't going to post flamebait anymore. Dammit.
And a nig rear spoiler on a front wheel drive car is just dumb. What, you want better grip on the back at high speed?
Yes, gentoo let's you do whatever you want with your system. That's wonderful for people who know what they are doing, or who honestly want to learn. But like I said, that's about 1 in 10.
Maybe it's just that I've been lucky enough to be using Linux in a corporate environment recently. When I started using Linux as a hobbiest, I would spen hours and hours recompiling things from source, playing around with the options, making things just the way I wanted them. That was before gentoo. When I first tried gentoo, I loved it. All that frustration of installing some package and having to install 12 other packages I didn't want just because the distro insisted on doign it that way? Gone. But now, I just want to get things done, quickly, and if it saves me an hour, I don't care that I have to fricken' install cups on a server I'm never, ever going to print from.
Your analogy falls apart at the end there. Cooking does something pretty damn direct and obviously useful for society. How about you try a little experiment and only eat raw meat for the next week or so and then get back to us?
But the analogy made me think. I've been cooking for as long as I have been using computers, and quite frankly I'm really, really good at both. But with cooking, I've gotten to the point where I don't have to think about it 99 times out of a hundred. There are really less than twenty recipies in the world. There's plenty of variations on those recipies, but once you learn the basic techniques, the way flavors from various spices and other ingredients combine, and the basic recipes, you do not need a cookbook. Ever.
Now, that does not apply to baking. Gentoo is like baking, not cooking. Cooking, if you are skilled, you can wing it with anything. Baking, unless you are an absolute master with 10+ years under your belt, you need to follow a recipe. I had no problem with gentoo, but I still need to follow a recipe when baking anything more complicateed than biscuits or pancakes (and that's just because I have the Joy of Cooking biscuit and pancake recipes memorized.)
And most normal people, when I cook for them, really really want to learn how I did it. And they seem to like the fact that I had fun doing it.
The fact that NASA robotics teams use gentoo on one of their controllers absolutely and without a doubt proves that every person who has ever used gentoo is a rocket scientist./sarcasm
As you evidently did not read my entire post before your knee started jerking uncontrollably, let me repost the relevant part here:
But if you do have some spare time, give it a try. You will learn something. Gentoo is a gearhead's distro. Just because 9 out of 10 gentoo users are like ricers who haven't the foggiest idea what they are doing or why, that doesn't mean that someone smart and motivated can't get something out of it. I did. I wouldn't use it as my primary desktop distro, but for getting into the nuts and bolts of the applications you use, there's nothing like it.
Gentoo is great for people like NASA roboticists. But it's really only for people who need to know what's going on under the hood. And I'm sorry if it offends you, but most gentoo advocates come across like ricers, not like rocket scientists.
I've used gentoo. Not recently, mind you, but when it first came out. It's not that hard now, from what I hear. There's oodles more, better documentationIt's fun, and you learn a lot from it.
But "control" over your system? Let's be honest, for most folks that use gentoo, that's like the ricer who says his "Type R" emblem makes his Civic go faster. It's hours of effort for.0001% benefit. It's not the type of control that most people need. If you want to install gentoo to "be cool" then you are a loser. If you want to install it to learn, then you are a hacker. (in the good sense)
No, because unlike posting linux distyro flames, masturbation generally doesn't hurt anyone. Except for kittens. We all know God kills a kitten every time you masturbate. Little known fact: every time you install gentoo, God kills a cockroach.
But seriously, Gentoo users are generally like "ricers," gearheads who put park bench rear wings onto toyota celicas. They focus far too much attention on getting far too little benefit, when there are better solutions out there. When was the last time you heard of some big corporation going with gentoo? Never, because big corporations don't have that kind of time to waste.
But if you do have some spare time, give it a try. You will learn something. Gentoo is a gearhead's distro. Just because 9 out of 10 gentoo users are like ricers who haven't the foggiest idea what they are doing or why, that doesn't mean that someone smart and motivated can't get something out of it. I did. I wouldn't use it as my primary desktop distro, but for getting into the nuts and bolts of the applications you use, there's nothing like it.
I know what you mean. Reading the article, I was laughing when I realized he hadn't frobnozled the prepalpitator scripts with the correct USE -octaroon -dingo flags. I just knew that would come back to bite him on the ass latter. Simply follow the directions, people! Perfectly easy, my grandmother has severe alzheimer's and she managed to get gentoo installed from source in under 15 seconds.
Seriously, it's not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla install with exactly and nothing but the recommended options. But I was doing stuff like that with Linux before there was even a gentoo, just for fun. It is fun, for a certain type of person. But, like masturbation, it's a very personal kind of fun that doesn't contribute anything very useful to society at large. And most normal people really, really don't want to hear the gory details about how you did it and how much fun it was.
They aren't advertising a product, they are exercising their constitutionally protected human right to lie through their corporate teeth. It's political speech, the most protected kind of all. They could legally tell you that voting for net nuetrality meant the government would have to shoot your children in the head. Don't you love living in the United Corporations of America? Now get out there and shop, consumer, shop for the good of your country!
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour, That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned, A sun that is the source of all our power. The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see Are moving at a million miles a day In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour, Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars. It's a hundred thousand light years side to side. It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick, But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide. We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point. We go 'round every two hundred million years, And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.
(Animated calliope interlude)
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding In all of the directions it can whizz As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
It's the tubes. You see, things have to chopped into little pieces, appropriately called "bits" to be sent through the tubes without clogging them. Real girls can not survive being chopped into bits! So no, nothing you see on the internet is real. Why just yesterday I was hungry and told one of my aides to send me a ham sandwich through the internets. They asked me how to go about that and I told them to scan it in and send it by email. When it got here, I printed it out, and let me tell you, it tasted nothing like a ham sandwich!
Well, in your case it makes sense to use omnipod, if a large part of your company is already using it. I guess it would also make sense for firms that don't have the time, inclination, or technical know-how to do it themselves. I'm not that much of an open-source zealot that I can't see there is a place for other solutions. I just finished setting up jabber where I work, so I'm kinda on a jabber kick is all. Instant messaging is really a great thing for business. Many time people have a really quick question that doesn't warrant a phone call but email would take too long. IM is perfect. After setting it up here, everyone I've talked to says they use it on a daily, if not hourly basis.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you what makes Gentoo an acceptable target of derision. Fanatics. People who become enraged beyond reason when their favorite tool is called into question. It's a Linux distribution, not a Holy Book. Which linux distribution you use has absolutely no bearing on what kind of a person you are. Yet many Gentoo users take any criticism of their Holy Distribution as personally as if someone had just, as you put it, kicked them in the nuts.
I mean, so what? It's just a Linux distribution. I've used over a dozen. At work I admin a dozen SuSE servers. Tell me how much SuSE sucks, I won't care. Using Gentoo doesn't make you cool. Not using it doesn't make you uncool. Here, I'll give you some more ammo, you can make fun of me: I watch Friends on TV, I run Windows XP at home, I used to work for Greenpeace. Take your pick, tell me how much Friends sucks, Windows sucks and Greenpeace sucks. I won't be hurt because those things aren't me! They are just things I watch, use, or did for a living.
I mean, how insecure do you have to be to take criticism of a Linux distribution personally?
Gentoo isn't a joke. It's a cool distribution. I spent literally weeks on end fiddling with it because it was fun. But even the people on the gentoo forums thought that funroll-loops.org was funny.
I'm not saying that literally 9 out of every 10 people who use gentoo is a ricer. It's a figure of speach, a humorous exageration. Anyone who wasn't hopelessly insecure could figure that out. If more people who used FreeBSD were like you, I'd be making fun of them, too. I like Linux, and I like gentoo, and people like you with your over the top hystrionics give both of them a bad name.
Sure, the PS3 will be sold at a loss, but look at the numbers, they'll more than make up for it in volume!
(Family Guy reference in case you didn't know)
Peter Griffin - If you could have any woman in the world, who would it be?
Quagmire - Taylor Hanson.
Joe Swanson - Taylor Hanson is a guy.
[Pause]
Quagmire - [Laughs] You guys are yankin' me. "Hey, let's put one over on old Quagmire."
Peter - No, he's actually a guy, Quagmire.
Quagmire - What? That's insane. That's impossible.
[Pause]
Quagmire - Oh god. Oh my god. I've got all these magazines. Oh god.
Thank you. All these people with their "Oooh, look at the anal wiring job, what if you have to fix or move something?" were really starting to piss me off. Lazy and uninformed, what a winning combo. Goobers can't even tell the front of a rack from the back, and have no idea of the right way to wire either. They're the ones who's wiring ends up looking like a plate of spaghetti in a few years.
Yeah, because the cables in that winning system were all store bought - NOT! How hard is it to test a cable after you've terminated it to the exact length you need for the neatest, tidiest install possible? I used to do a lot of that, and I would have to re-terminate maybe one out of every fifty cables, it's not that hard.
If you want a really nice looking install, you need to terminate yourself.
You, my friend, are a perfect example of why I don't hang out on gentoo-server. You are a ricer. You know you're a ricer, and that's why the comments hurt so much that you started frothing at the mouth. If it weren't for people like you, I might still be using gentoo. Intelligent, non-fanatical people have no trouble praising the parts of something that deserves praise while still poking fun at the parts that deserve it.
Having /etc under version control is key in any place where multiple admins can work on the same machine. I learned this from the guy who taught me Unix, SCO Unix of all things (hey, remember when they were cool?!?) The rest of your comments are spot on, too.
/.ers know that, I just wish most managers and CTOs knew that. CYA and all that.
As for how litle support a decent OS needs, I know that, you know that, most
Cool. Sigh, and here I was thinking I was lucky because I got to use SuSE at work...
Between this, the gentoo article, and the global warming article, I'm seeing some local warming right here.
Really? What company do you work for? I'd like to work there! How did you get your managers to okay that? Who do you go through for support? Where I work, it doesn't matter that we can support an OS ourselves, we still need a support contract to CYA.
Oh, that was a bad typo. Sorry. s/nig/big/ Stupid fingers.
I love gentoo! I love gentoo users, too. I just see too many people (here, not really in the gentoo forums, or mailing lists or IRC channels) who read a story like this and start to get all defensive and say things like "This guy must be moron for not being able to install gentoo!" Sometimes gentoo users seem just a tad full of themselves. As if watching cryptic compilation messages scroll by for hours has made them a linux expert overnight, and anyone who hasn't, isn't.
You can run whatever OS you want to, but if someone has criticisms after giving it a try, what's the ponit in just writing them off?
As every real gearhead gentoo user knows, it's not about CFLAGS, it's about USE ;)
I pulled those numbers out of my ass. And I haven't been part of the gentoo community for years, when it first came out the zealots were pretty shrill and I saw a lot of really, really uninformed comments here and in other places around the net.
Maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I really like gentoo. Or maybe gentoo fanatics still take anything less than unconditional support as an outright attack. If you've been part of the gentoo community for long, you would know that gentoo supporters started the whole "gentoo user as ricer" meme, to make fun of the people who didn't know what the hell they were doing and just wanted to look cool. You've seen funroll-loops.org, right?
I will say that the ratio of hackerness to riciness falls off pretty quickly the further from the core gentoo community one gets. By the time one is in slashdot country, it may not be 1 hacker for every 9 ricers, but it's pretty close, IMO.
I swear, everyone here is getting to that line and getting so worked up they have to reply without reading the rest of the comment. And here I'd promised myself I wasn't going to post flamebait anymore. Dammit.
And a nig rear spoiler on a front wheel drive car is just dumb. What, you want better grip on the back at high speed?
Yes, gentoo let's you do whatever you want with your system. That's wonderful for people who know what they are doing, or who honestly want to learn. But like I said, that's about 1 in 10.
Maybe it's just that I've been lucky enough to be using Linux in a corporate environment recently. When I started using Linux as a hobbiest, I would spen hours and hours recompiling things from source, playing around with the options, making things just the way I wanted them. That was before gentoo. When I first tried gentoo, I loved it. All that frustration of installing some package and having to install 12 other packages I didn't want just because the distro insisted on doign it that way? Gone. But now, I just want to get things done, quickly, and if it saves me an hour, I don't care that I have to fricken' install cups on a server I'm never, ever going to print from.
Your analogy falls apart at the end there. Cooking does something pretty damn direct and obviously useful for society. How about you try a little experiment and only eat raw meat for the next week or so and then get back to us?
But the analogy made me think. I've been cooking for as long as I have been using computers, and quite frankly I'm really, really good at both. But with cooking, I've gotten to the point where I don't have to think about it 99 times out of a hundred. There are really less than twenty recipies in the world. There's plenty of variations on those recipies, but once you learn the basic techniques, the way flavors from various spices and other ingredients combine, and the basic recipes, you do not need a cookbook. Ever.
Now, that does not apply to baking. Gentoo is like baking, not cooking. Cooking, if you are skilled, you can wing it with anything. Baking, unless you are an absolute master with 10+ years under your belt, you need to follow a recipe. I had no problem with gentoo, but I still need to follow a recipe when baking anything more complicateed than biscuits or pancakes (and that's just because I have the Joy of Cooking biscuit and pancake recipes memorized.)
And most normal people, when I cook for them, really really want to learn how I did it. And they seem to like the fact that I had fun doing it.
How about doing a search on that page before claiming they don't use gentoo?
As you evidently did not read my entire post before your knee started jerking uncontrollably, let me repost the relevant part here:
Gentoo is great for people like NASA roboticists. But it's really only for people who need to know what's going on under the hood. And I'm sorry if it offends you, but most gentoo advocates come across like ricers, not like rocket scientists.
I've used gentoo. Not recently, mind you, but when it first came out. It's not that hard now, from what I hear. There's oodles more, better documentationIt's fun, and you learn a lot from it.
.0001% benefit. It's not the type of control that most people need. If you want to install gentoo to "be cool" then you are a loser. If you want to install it to learn, then you are a hacker. (in the good sense)
But "control" over your system? Let's be honest, for most folks that use gentoo, that's like the ricer who says his "Type R" emblem makes his Civic go faster. It's hours of effort for
No, because unlike posting linux distyro flames, masturbation generally doesn't hurt anyone. Except for kittens. We all know God kills a kitten every time you masturbate. Little known fact: every time you install gentoo, God kills a cockroach.
But seriously, Gentoo users are generally like "ricers," gearheads who put park bench rear wings onto toyota celicas. They focus far too much attention on getting far too little benefit, when there are better solutions out there. When was the last time you heard of some big corporation going with gentoo? Never, because big corporations don't have that kind of time to waste.
But if you do have some spare time, give it a try. You will learn something. Gentoo is a gearhead's distro. Just because 9 out of 10 gentoo users are like ricers who haven't the foggiest idea what they are doing or why, that doesn't mean that someone smart and motivated can't get something out of it. I did. I wouldn't use it as my primary desktop distro, but for getting into the nuts and bolts of the applications you use, there's nothing like it.
I know what you mean. Reading the article, I was laughing when I realized he hadn't frobnozled the prepalpitator scripts with the correct USE -octaroon -dingo flags. I just knew that would come back to bite him on the ass latter. Simply follow the directions, people! Perfectly easy, my grandmother has severe alzheimer's and she managed to get gentoo installed from source in under 15 seconds.
Seriously, it's not just incredibly tedious, it's also complicated unless you are doing a stock vanilla install with exactly and nothing but the recommended options. But I was doing stuff like that with Linux before there was even a gentoo, just for fun. It is fun, for a certain type of person. But, like masturbation, it's a very personal kind of fun that doesn't contribute anything very useful to society at large. And most normal people really, really don't want to hear the gory details about how you did it and how much fun it was.
They aren't advertising a product, they are exercising their constitutionally protected human right to lie through their corporate teeth. It's political speech, the most protected kind of all. They could legally tell you that voting for net nuetrality meant the government would have to shoot your children in the head. Don't you love living in the United Corporations of America? Now get out there and shop, consumer, shop for the good of your country!
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough...
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the "Milky Way".
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
(Animated calliope interlude)
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
My girlfriend in college had IE on her box once, but we got a cream that cleared that right up...
It's the tubes. You see, things have to chopped into little pieces, appropriately called "bits" to be sent through the tubes without clogging them. Real girls can not survive being chopped into bits! So no, nothing you see on the internet is real. Why just yesterday I was hungry and told one of my aides to send me a ham sandwich through the internets. They asked me how to go about that and I told them to scan it in and send it by email. When it got here, I printed it out, and let me tell you, it tasted nothing like a ham sandwich!
Well, in your case it makes sense to use omnipod, if a large part of your company is already using it. I guess it would also make sense for firms that don't have the time, inclination, or technical know-how to do it themselves. I'm not that much of an open-source zealot that I can't see there is a place for other solutions. I just finished setting up jabber where I work, so I'm kinda on a jabber kick is all. Instant messaging is really a great thing for business. Many time people have a really quick question that doesn't warrant a phone call but email would take too long. IM is perfect. After setting it up here, everyone I've talked to says they use it on a daily, if not hourly basis.