Why is everyone getting so much trouble installing Gentoo?
Gentoo was the first distro I ever installed (and pretty much my first Linux experience, not counting slight playing around with Knoppix), and I got it installed in a day (technically about 6 hours at most). I just followed the handbook, read carefully. The ONLY trouble I had was the kernel compilation failed for some reason, and it worked fine when I started it a second time. I had no reasons to look for help on the forums or IRC, since the handbook explained everything so clearly if only you read it. I had a working KDE the next day (left it to emerge X, KDE and Firefox overnight).
My second install was a total breeze, in 3 hours X was already installed (note that this includes compilation of the kernel and X).
If a complete Linux newb could install it in 6 hours, then I can't see why someone having used another distro would have any trouble at all. And if it's an issue arising from lack of hardware support, how is Gentoo to blame rather than Linux? Half of the questions I read in #gentoo are clearly explained in the documentation, most of the others are easily found in the forums or wiki.
And, of course, the most important thing: If you don't want to spend a few hours installing Linux, then why did you choose Gentoo?
I don't know much about it, either, but I will attempt to answer your question.
Most of the boot time is "wasted" in loading modules into memory, loading needed services (daemons, scripts to set up the environment, etc.). The time required to load up the initrd image is minimal, and few other things are "created" during boot (maybe/dev device nodes, but I think those are also saved in a tarball).
What you are proposing would offer little speed increase: you still have to load everything into memory. And if you propose saving what's in memory to an image to be loaded on boot, this already exists.
There's other ways to play some old games. In particular, Day of the Tentacle, which you mentioned, uses the Scumm engine, which the open-source community is reimplementing in a project called SvummVM: http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/compatibility.php
Other games also have free clones able to run the originals: freeciv (Civilization), freecraft (Warcraft), OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon). I'm sure there are others around there.
KDE (K Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment and development platform built with Trolltech's Qt toolkit. It runs on most Unix and Unix-like systems, such as Linux, BSD, AIX, Unixware, OpenServer and Solaris. There are also ports to Mac OS X using its X11 layer and Microsoft Windows using Cygwin. Currently, a large portion of the primary KDE libraries and a few other applications can work natively on Microsoft Windows, thanks to the KDElibs/win32 Project. Ports of other KDE applications are being discussed.
Not very useful. I don't have a laptop, but I'm pretty sure anyone who has one has moved more than a few feet away from it more than once. This would, therefore, need to be activated and deactivated, which cancels your point about it being automatic.
Last I read, the most likely replacement will be gstreamer. Too bad, I've had lots of trouble with gstreamer, and none with, say, xine.
The sound system differences only prove that it's impossible to make a program be both KDE and GNOME-like. Sure, you can make it use either GTK or Qt, but that doesn't make them be a KDE or a GNOME app. The two have differing ideas, from visual to usability-related.
Last but not least, KDE gnomes are usually integrated with the rest of KDE, I suppose the same is true for GNOME. How would this integration be implemented properly?
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Why is everyone getting so much trouble installing Gentoo?
Gentoo was the first distro I ever installed (and pretty much my first Linux experience, not counting slight playing around with Knoppix), and I got it installed in a day (technically about 6 hours at most). I just followed the handbook, read carefully. The ONLY trouble I had was the kernel compilation failed for some reason, and it worked fine when I started it a second time. I had no reasons to look for help on the forums or IRC, since the handbook explained everything so clearly if only you read it. I had a working KDE the next day (left it to emerge X, KDE and Firefox overnight).
My second install was a total breeze, in 3 hours X was already installed (note that this includes compilation of the kernel and X).
If a complete Linux newb could install it in 6 hours, then I can't see why someone having used another distro would have any trouble at all. And if it's an issue arising from lack of hardware support, how is Gentoo to blame rather than Linux? Half of the questions I read in #gentoo are clearly explained in the documentation, most of the others are easily found in the forums or wiki.
And, of course, the most important thing: If you don't want to spend a few hours installing Linux, then why did you choose Gentoo?
I don't know much about it, either, but I will attempt to answer your question.
/dev device nodes, but I think those are also saved in a tarball).
Most of the boot time is "wasted" in loading modules into memory, loading needed services (daemons, scripts to set up the environment, etc.). The time required to load up the initrd image is minimal, and few other things are "created" during boot (maybe
What you are proposing would offer little speed increase: you still have to load everything into memory. And if you propose saving what's in memory to an image to be loaded on boot, this already exists.
There's other ways to play some old games. In particular, Day of the Tentacle, which you mentioned, uses the Scumm engine, which the open-source community is reimplementing in a project called SvummVM: http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/compatibility.php
Other games also have free clones able to run the originals: freeciv (Civilization), freecraft (Warcraft), OpenTTD (Transport Tycoon). I'm sure there are others around there.
Not very useful. I don't have a laptop, but I'm pretty sure anyone who has one has moved more than a few feet away from it more than once. This would, therefore, need to be activated and deactivated, which cancels your point about it being automatic.
Last I read, the most likely replacement will be gstreamer. Too bad, I've had lots of trouble with gstreamer, and none with, say, xine.
The sound system differences only prove that it's impossible to make a program be both KDE and GNOME-like. Sure, you can make it use either GTK or Qt, but that doesn't make them be a KDE or a GNOME app. The two have differing ideas, from visual to usability-related.
Last but not least, KDE gnomes are usually integrated with the rest of KDE, I suppose the same is true for GNOME. How would this integration be implemented properly?