[ILUG] What the difference...

[Kevin Philp]

Without fanning the flames of distro wars too much.

I have used Gentoo for some time at home. Its a long process to install (allow 
a whole weekend), its not difficult and doesn't take much of your time its 
just the compilation of KDE is long but when its installed its a doddle to 
upgrade. Gentoo does not have releases like other distro's, it just 
continually upgrades packages in portage. With other distro's you will get to 
a point where you need to upgrade to a newer release. So the upgrade cycle is 
continuous rather than security/bug fixes followed by occasional big 
upgrades. I also learn't a lot from installing and running Gentoo and the 
website has great content, is well organised and easy to use. There is a 
strong anti Gentoo camp but if I want to install from source code and have 
cpu cycles to burn thats my call. I don't run Gentoo for speed, I run it 
because they have good, well organised documentation, a lot of packages in 
portage, maintenance is easy and I have enjoyed the learning curve.

I don't use Gentoo at work - the demands are different. Currently we use 
Mandrake but I am thinking about switching to Ubuntu or Debian. However 
currently I can't seem to get a stable AMD64 Ubuntu system - no criticism - I 
am just further down the learning curve on Ubuntu than Gentoo. I think its 
xorg/nvidia playing up.

Kevin.



On Friday 10 February 2006 09:50, Lars Hecking wrote:
>> >Productivity.
>> >I'm after spending the last 5 hours trying to get it installed & I
>> >give up, I'll just use Ubuntu.
>>
>> Good choice, you will not notice any difference in speed between the
>> two to be honest.
>
> I did however notice a difference in speed between SuSE 9.x and Gentoo.
>
> Gentoo is nice if you want to live on the bleeding egde and play with
> stuff. A significant number of features broke over the lifetime of my
> current Gentoo system, and while I got everything fixed, this isn't exactly
> nice. It does have the side effect of getting to know the system better,
> though, looking at obscure packages and their place in the overall system
> ("WTF is foobar and why did it fry my modem?"; I exaggerate, of course ;-)