My well-tuned sense of superiority likes nothing better than continual confirmation of its eternal righteousness.
In that vein, I can only marvel at the continued existence of Linux distros that aren’t Gentoo.
Yet other distros do exist. Eugenia Loli-Queru reviews one of the newest, Fedora Core 1. Mrs. Loli-Queru seems fairly unimpressed. She encounters bugs that should have been quashed early in development, and other limitations like lack of support for MP3 playback out of the box (or cd).
Yet the problems Mrs. Loli-Queru encounters are not problems confined to this specific build of this specific distro. These limitations are the inherent conflicts of a binary distribution. Packages lack dependencies, third party or custom packages fail in strange ways, and official support is lacking in important areas.
The source-based simplicity of Gentoo, and its ilk, is its power. Package management is in the hands of the user. Package conflicts are in the hands of package creators. A bug in Gnome is often Gnome’s problem, not Gentoo’s.
If the question is Linux, Gentoo is the answer.
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2 responses so far ↓
Debian is the way to go. Even though it’s compiled for i386 (if you run Intel), it tends to run quicker because package maintainers tend to know more about c-flags than your typical Gentoo dork.
Rereading my post, it appears I failed to even mention Debian. I do like Debian. It was the first Linux distro I ever used. I won’t argue about speed and c-flags because I don’t think those optimizations matter significantly.
The real advantage of Gentoo over Debian is in the packages themselves. Binary packages have their benefits. They are quick to install and users don’t have to worry about compiler errors. That said, Gentoo’s portage couples ease-of-use with the greatest level of flexibility possible.
As a Linux user, I want control over my system. I want to customization without excessive complication. Gentoo gives me exactly that.