Comments for Penultimate Reality

Comment on (Not) Why I Use Gentoo: USE Flags by Jason Lynch

Jason Lynch — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:19:10 +0000

I definitely see the value in USE flags, at least as a concept, especially on servers or embedded environments where controlling dependencies can be mission-critical. I think Gentoo has too many in some cases, adding options that most people aren’t going to have a clue about. (Such as choosing between expat and libxml2. As a user, why do I care? I have no idea what the relative strengths/weaknesses are, and it makes more sense to just use whichever provides more features, rather than giving an option.)

For desktop life, I just want the most feature-rich environment I can get. I know there are people who don’t have that same philosophy, and I’d never propose getting rid of USE flags, but I do think there’s room for improvement. I also find that they’re not particularly relevant to my usage.

Comment on (Not) Why I Use Gentoo: Optimization by Jason Lynch

Jason Lynch — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:14:51 +0000

I think I mostly meant ricing. When I first started using Gentoo, back in 2004 or so, a lot of people would claim their reason for using it was because they could set the CFLAGS and that it made it sixteen times faster, or whatever. I’m sure there’s something to be gained from controlling CFLAGS directly, but whatever it is, it wouldn’t be enough on its own to get me to select Gentoo, without other factors.

Comment on (Not) Why I Use Gentoo: USE Flags by Pandu E Poluan

Pandu E Poluan — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:49:58 +0000

Ahh, that explains our differing view as to USE flags

As I mentioned in my comment in the previous article, I use Gentoo mainly in the back-end. These are the servers that powers my company. And I certainly appreciate that I can *ensure* the servers to *never* install something not suitable for a server.

Of course, life on the desktop is vastly different; here I can give no opinion due to being ‘forced’ to use Windows (some proprietary apps developed in-house).

Comment on (Not) Why I Use Gentoo: Optimization by Pandu E Poluan

Pandu E Poluan — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:45:25 +0000

I have to *partially* agree with you.

If by ‘optimization’ you meant ‘ricing the CFLAGS’, that is also *not* my reason to deploy Gentoo.

But, I view ‘optimization’ as a holistic approach to Gentoo installation. Explanation: I use Gentoo primarily in my employer’s data center, running as VMs on top of XenServer. With Gentoo, I can be 100% sure that my VMs are ‘moulded’ exactly to the environment, e.g., kernel settings, -march that allows VM migration, deamons essential for management (and no more), etc.

Anyways, this series seem interesting; I promise to read them all

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Development Environment by Dieter

Dieter — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:15:39 +0000

I’ve used Gentoo quite a bit a number of years ago, but am glad I stepped forward to Ubuntu.

Your posts have brought back a lot of memories, but no nostalgic ones. Many of the points you mark as strong points of Gentoo I am happy to be rid of.
Many things even sound archaïc. Compiling your packages? Manually merging config files?

And everything else is in Ubuntu.

Disclaimer: I have noticed I am not as hard-core as many nerds. I am a pragmatic person, and my OS is a productivity tool, not a hobby of mine. It needs to work, fast and efficiënt with as little customising needed as possible.

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Configuration File Management by Dieter

Dieter — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 13:10:59 +0000

This is one aspect of Gentoo I entirely did NOT like. The perpetual merging of config files, which often you have no clue of what it all means, which makes you eventually just replace the config files and hope for the best. Often breaking the system .
Ok so maybe I’m just impatient or stupid, but I found it quite sucky.

I now use Ubuntu, and it does the same, but only EXTREMELY rarely. For the rest, it just works. Excellent!

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Rolling Releases by Jason Lynch

Jason Lynch — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:16:50 +0000

I think it’s been a few years since I last looked at it. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the different distributions out there.

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Unused Dependency Removal by Jason Lynch

Jason Lynch — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:13:02 +0000

The problem that I’ve seen with tasks is that there doesn’t seem to be an overarching meta-package for them. If i want to install a task, several packages will usually need to be marked as manually installed. It’s not that big an issue, though, and Gentoo doesn’t really have an equivalent of tasks, anyway. (They could provide such a thing using sets, but I don’t see that anyone’s actually done that.)

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Rolling Releases by airdrik

airdrik — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:31:05 +0000

Have you ever looked into PCLinuxOS? It also does rolling releases and tends to focus a little more on stability.

Comment on Why I Use Gentoo: Development Environment by Owen Synge

Owen Synge — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 18:19:25 +0000

“Perhaps such an option already exists or has recently been added to distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora.”

To get the build dependacies for any package in a debian derivative:
apt-get build-dep package-youwant-tobuild

Have fun, with gentoo I find debian a very productive developer distribution too.