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Old 7th June 2008
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ninjatux ninjatux is offline
Real Name: Baqir Majlisi
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Antarctica
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Quote:
Originally Posted by greencross View Post
Well, actually I tried to launch Gentoo 2007 live DVD on my machine (very common, non-exotic one), but it stopped halfway after loading the kernel. Frankly I was disappointed and didn't even bother to google about this. I've been looking forward to the next release.
By the way what are your particular reasons to ditch Gentoo? Not for holy war, just to understand your position.
PS. Anyway my primary OS is still FreeBSD.
Just to give some background, I was using Gentoo for over two years. Since 2005, I've seen quality go down the drain. It takes ages for packages to get into stable, and it wasn't like that before. I ran unstable for most of my time with Gentoo. On top of that, the default set of USE flags for each package more than likely give you a butchered package. For example, MPD (MusicPD) has support for almost every common media format out there, but by default Gentoo only enables a handful. You need to adjust the per-package USE flags. To do this, you have to look them up because they are not self-explanatory. It's the same for every other package. Plus, now you have package managers like Paludis being developed and support by some developers, while others continue to use Portage or pkgcore. I understand choice, but at least developers should use the same platform. This is one thing that got to me. I run KDE SVN, now KDE 4.1 Beta 1, and the Gentoo KDE 4 team switched midway to Paludis. I did not want to install Paludis, but I had to. I didn't like it, and I ended up breaking my system. I've broken my Gentoo system about eight or nine times, about three in the past six months, and I've used stable flags for years. So, I just about had it.

These days, I'm of the mindset that optimizations don't always yield real-world results. I say that because I run Debian. Unless Debian compiles all its packages with suitable optimizations and then tests each package, packages on Debian are just as fast as those on Gentoo, if not faster. Firefox always crawled for me on Gentoo and was one of the buggiest I've ever seen. It's never been like that on OS X or Debian or FreeBSD for that matter. And, I wouldn't be able to have all my programs installed on Gentoo and the system configured the way I need in one hour, at most two hours, as I've been able to on Debian. I guess I just look more for the "it just works" rather than the theoretical "it works best". I don't know if you can really test the latter, as much as Gentoo claims.

So, I guess distance from the Gentoo philosophy kind of got to me. One thing I liked about Gentoo was the USE flags system, but after using FreeBSD for a while, it's very very poorly implemented. I like how FreeBSD lets you do per-package optimizations without ever having to make additional configuration files. The way FreeBSD does it is the best, and I'd like to see more of that in Gentoo, but until I do, I stick with Debian.

Last edited by ninjatux; 7th June 2008 at 12:33 AM.
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