Re: [Lilux-help] Gentoo / source-based

I used it for a while. From my experience, the OS was very well integrated. I was impressed how everything seemed to be set up for me automagically whenever I installed a new program. That applied for both the Gnome and KDE environments. I liked the speed that I got out of the boot process. Gentoo only instals what you tell it, so you have complete control from the beginning of what's on your system (same with Debian --- the RPM based systems can be peared down, but that is post install). Gentoo is also the absolute best system that I have seen for running a bleeding edge of technology system. It doesn't have the dependency problems that RPM based systems all seem to have. So, why don't I run it now? Well, I found it a complete pain to download and recompile all of KDE again, just to do a security patch. If they offered the ability, just to download a source code patch, that might have been enough to keep me. Case in point, I upgraded to xorg what ever version. It took several hours to compile. less than a week later, there was an update, so I had to wait several more hours for it to compile. Gentoo is also somewhat sloppy (in my opinion) in it's management of software. Install KDE without X installed, and it can figure out exactly what needs to be installed to get it working. But remove kde, it only removes the exact programs that you specify. Good thing if you know what you are doing and have the time to do all of the hand management, but if you are like me, and really have no clue how to manage a system, you are left up a creek without a paddle. I also noticed that my free harddrive space shrank very quickly. I never figured out what was eating up my disk space (attribute this to ignorance on my part). If Gentoo offered a binary repository with reasonable defaults, I would consider going back. (I'm running Debian now, and find it quite nice, especially once you've found some of the better unofficial repositories). If you want to learn loads about how Linux works, install Gentoo. I learned more about Unix using Gentoo for a few months, than I had learned in several years using SuSE. Mike