So I finally made my choice of new distros. I opted for gentoo. I actually tried archlinux first but it annoyed me insanely within ten minutes (don’t ask me why, it was a taste thing). See this post for more on why I changed.
Anyway, I then went and thought about it. [tag]Gentoo[/tag] is likely to have by far the best 64bit support because it’s a source-based distro – and it turns out to be true it seems.
Now I last used Gentoo a good 3 years ago, so a lot has changed, here then, a short review after my first 3 days, as we speak – I just loaded up my first functional KDE desktop.
The good:
Gentoo works. It takes some setups and even I did the initial stage3 install by following the manual along, but once running, things tend to be very fast. The system has a habit of being bleeding edge and you can do setups and customizations like nothing else allows.
It is definitely not a newbie distro, but then, this was never it’s focus. Gentoo is however an extremely good system for people with a litle bit of patience and knowledge. It is also, without a doubt the most complete 64Bit OS currently available.
the bad
On the downside: Gentoo takes ages to set up, especially if your computer and bandwith aren’t great. I’ve spent most of 3 days compiling just to get a KDE desktop up and running, several times I had to reemerge something because I only later discovered how crucial some USE flag I didn’t even know about was (like if you don’t emerge QT with USE=”opengl” then you can’t emerge kopete). On the other hand, I did choose to use the minimalist CD – if I had chosen the full LIVEcd – this may have been a much quicker process (I have to remember to try it sometime and see what it actually contains).
Genkernel annoyed me a bit. Once I learned that the gentoo minimalist livecd worked fine with my obscure SATA chip, I specifically chose it because the docs said it would produce basically the same kind of kernel (saving me from figuring out how to make the SATA chip go later). Turns out this is not so – the experimental SATA chipsets were left out by genkernel and I had to do a manual rebuild later to get my SATA drive visible (luckilly I have both a PATA drive and a SATA drive and I used the PATA as an OS drive).
The interesting
My thoughts: Gentoo may not be a desktop distro – but you could use it to build one, a great one. I am seeing it in my head. If one spends a bit of time, using it to build a really good system (keeping track of steps) – doing your setups, configs etc. and then build a livecd with a decent 3rd-generation installer out of that- it could be a great system. Which will be able to use portage for package management. It will lack behind other systems in speed of installing programs – but beat them every time in running speed. And ideally, it should automagically emerge world after the first install (in the background) to optimise even the base system for the specific box to the max.
Will I do ? Not yet, but maybe in the future.
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