[plug] Debian .vs. Gentoo

[William Kenworthy]

Ah, where's my flamethrower:

I agree with Scott in that the optimisation for speed thing is largely
smoke - not completely, but gain for effort can be small.

Current liveCD install is excellent with good auto hardware detection.

Gentoo's strength is configurability, ease of tuning and optimisation
for speed in special cases (despite what I said above, there are cases
where it does make a worthwhile difference, but it wont turn a 486 into
an athlon)

Downsides are time to build from scratch (there are full binary installs
that are as fast as other distros though), and you really do need to
know what you are doing: no safety ropes here.  Pick the wrong
optimisations for your hardware as I did for distroday1 and its slower
than debian.

All my systems have been built via modem from home!  That is, I still
have the tarballs from the first install and copy them around, updating
as necessary.  No real drama, but a bit slow for your first system.

I really learnt linux when I did my first gentoo install, despite years
of Mandrake and Redhat, I found I had only scratched the surface.  If
someone with linux experience comes up, I would say try gentoo (do a
binary install if time worries you) and learn, otherwise do Mandrake:
still my desktop of choice for the less experienced or those in a
hurry.  Forget redhat these days.  debian gives me the horrors.  They
say stable really is stable, but to get the thing to work on anything
modern you have gotta start installing lots of stuff that is, shall we
say - suspect (e.g., on distroday 1 debian actually had a later kernel
than gentoo coz the stable was so far out of date!) I have seen a few
dead/deadish debian systems and they do seem more prone to dependency
hell than release disro's like mandrake and redhat.

Mind you, I moved from Mandrake to Gentoo coz at least I can fix it when
things go wrong: binary distros always end up with me reformatting and
starting again after about 6 months of "whats happens if I do this ..."


Now I have insulted the debian crowd, I am going into hiding ...

BillK

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 19:15, scott at linuxit.com.au wrote:
> > I don't want to start a flame war, I am looking for advice.
> <snip>
> Not much chance of that :)
> 
> > I really am looking for advice to choosing between Debian and Gentoo on
> > a  686 on a limited Internet connection. It needs to be poweruser
> > enabled and  easy package management. Is their a 686 debian cd set?
> > I am looking for advice. Please keep flames to yourself. Also I know I
> > can  get reviews off the net but I want personal and local
> > opinions/experiances. A bit of info about the Gentoo installer would
> > also be nice, hardware  detection, preferred bootloader, speed. I would
> > probably start with a  precompiled stage 3.
> 
> Gentoo is good if you have a few weeks free to compile packages. If you
> compile them wrong, you are wasting your time - See distro day1 on
> linmagau.org). If you compile them correctly you are saving a few percent
> :) Bill may disagree, but that is what makes Linux good.
> Personally i don't recommend Dial-up if you want to use Gentoo, the true
> power of Gentoo comes from downloading and updating. The CDs are
> out-of-date in about 5 minutes.
> Updating is quite easy but then so is URPMI from Mandrake or APT from
> Debian. In-Fact i have yet to have a problem with URPMI.
> > p.s. This is a chance for Debian users to convince me to stay and
> > Gentoo  users to try and persuade me to convert WITHOUT flaming ;)
> 
> Why not run both and decide yourself :)
> I run Mandrake 9.2 at home, Debian Woody/Sarge/Sid on my work workstation,
> Mandrake 9.1 on the reception machine and Redhat 9 on my test machine (for
> a laugh). I don't run Gentoo because i only want to install in  couple of
> hours not a couple of weeks :)
> If you don't want to do anything; just install Mandrake. If you add PLF to
> you URPMI sources you will have a constantly current distro that just
> works.
> Seriously try Mandrake it may surprise you :-0) Get your head around URPMI
> and i am sure you wont go back.
> Try CRUX for a 686 optimised Distro.
> 
> Regards
> Scott Middleton
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
William Kenworthy <billk at iinet.net.au>

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