I wrote a post recently that focused only on things I see as shortcomings or problems with Gentoo GNU/Linux. That was the intent of the article, to explain why I switched to Ubuntu for my personal systems. On the flip side, nothing’s perfect, but nothing’s perfectly flawed, either. There are still many things I like about Gentoo.
For one thing, the developer and user community are great (I have written about this several times before). Two developers took the time to reply to my article, and the bug I filed on MySQL is fixed now. Gentoo has great people behind it, and I really appreciate it.
There are also many things you can do with a Gentoo system you can’t do with most (any?) other systems. Portage is a great tool. You can learn about how things really work with Gentoo. You can use it as a meta-distribution to build a custom binary distribution. It’s really a blank slate. That’s part of the point.
So, while I continue to enjoy the easy installation and low maintenance of Ubuntu on my desktop computers, I don’t want to leave my appreciation for Gentoo, especially the Gentoo people, unsaid. Thanks.
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It’s funny, but I switched from Gentoo to Ubuntu for the same reasons. Gentoo is very powerful and has many features that I like, but at some point, my mindset changed to just wanting something that was very easy and just worked, so I switched to Ubuntu. They each have their pluses and minuses, but both are definitely targeted to different audiences.
One more thing to like about Gentoo and Portage - g-cpan. It creates ebuilds on the fly for Perl CPAN modules so you can manage them through Portage. I’ve been playing with it and while there are still a couple of bugs (a big one is that if a dependency is already in Portage, the most recent version is marked as required rather than the most recent unmasked, or even better the version the CPAN package actually specifies, so sometimes you have to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~x86″ for emerge to run. But this is somewhat tempered by the fact that usually the packages already in Portage are no higher what would be installed if you did it through CPAN anyway so you aren’t risking anything. Also this bug is marked as fixed in next rev), but being able to know what modules you have installed and being able to cleanly uninstall them is tremendous. It is a two step process, but I think it is great!
Re: John
I agree. I just wish I had time to help get g-pypi (the Python equivalent to g-cpan) debugged and polished.