Debian vs. Gentoo vs. Mandrake, am I understand this right?

[darktubbly]

Simpler than what? Gentoo doesn't have an installer

Well, as long as you can read English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, or Dutch, Gentoo's pretty easy to set up. Sorry for the illiterate folks though.

 

[xcript]

Feh, installing debian is a piece of cake.

Gentoo is more fun though

That and the online community isn't made up almost entirely of elitist f*cktards. They're exceedingly helpful.

Later.. :beer:

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: darktubbly

Simpler than what? Gentoo doesn't have an installer

Well, as long as you can read English, German, French, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, or Dutch, Gentoo's pretty easy to set up. Sorry for the illiterate folks though.

We don't need your pity! :|:evil:

 

[darktubbly]

We don't need your pity! :|:evil:

:Q Relax...I'm sure there's a deb package you can get or pills you can take.

 

[Flatline]

apt-get remove pity

 

[Chumpman]

I've used several linux distributions, and it's my personal experience that debian had by far the fastest "out of the box performance." Programs are much quicker to open than in Mandrake or other distros (especially mandrake though). Gentoo can be fast, but if you have to spend 2 days configuring and compiling, you lose all your "supposed speed." Another option you don't list is Slackware 9, which is definitely a viable option for you, it doesn't have much in the way of package management, but the set up is pretty easy, and it is pretty responsive. Whatever you choose, just have fun with it, and if you ever need to ask a quetion, make sure you RTFM first.

 

[xcript]

Originally posted by: Chumpman
Gentoo can be fast, but if you have to spend 2 days configuring and compiling, you lose all your "supposed speed."

Sigh. I think this is the only supposed drawback people can come up with when attempting to put Gentoo down.

It takes me about 10-15 minutes to configure everything initially, then I leave my box to compile for 6 hours or so. That's it..

Ok, so I'm not compiling KDE (6 hours or so compile for me), but for all my "trouble" I come out with a fast, streamlined system that's easily kept simply up-to-date or on the bleeding edge (depending on how the 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS' variable is set).

It's not as if I'll then be recompiling X on a daily basis..

Now I can see how Gentoo may be a problem for those who are prone to breaking their system regularly, but for the rest of us it's the only logical choice.

Sorry, just had to add that last bit to piss off the Debian users. I'm only joking of course.

Anyway, that's enough from me.. Later :beer:

P.S. Remember, there are binary packages for most (if not all) of the otherwise relatively large compiles in the portage tree.

Edit: I think we need some new linux related avatars, we can't all be tuxes..

 

[Nothinman]

Ok, so I'm not compiling KDE

But that's one of the big programs that might benefit from it, what's the point if you only compile small things like coreutils?

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Someone needs to do a gentoo benchmark.

I.e.: build an entire gentoo system on the biggest baddest p4 system, with zero optimization, i386 compile target, etc. -- and then, on the same machine, build a gentoo system with all of the craziest optimizations. Then they could run a comprehensive suite of benchmarks and tests to see what the difference is.

Anyways, "they" say that compiler optimizations only increase the speed of general purpose apps by like 5% if you're lucky. If that is true, then the gentoo speed myth is just that -- a myth.

 

[darktubbly]

Here's an interesting read about why people switched to Gentoo from other distros. Once again, here's another vote for the helpful people on Gentoo's support forum. Rarely if ever does one see an elitist "RTFM" attitude here.

By the way, I'm not certain if other software management systems do this or not, but if you're interested in running the latest, bleeding edge versions of...whatever...without breaking your old versions, Gentoo's portage system keeps everything in order.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Originally posted by: darktubbly
Here's an interesting read about why people switched to Gentoo from other distros. Once again, here's another vote for the helpful people on Gentoo's support forum. Rarely if ever does one see an elitist "RTFM" attitude here.

#debian on irc.freenode.net is a VERY BUSY, very helpful place, in general.

RTFM taken to the extreme is bad, but I find that although gentoo's community is nice -- many of them are also unknowledgable and/or naive. Many new linux users go for gentoo because it seems "cool," and they end up quickly turning into uninformed (but friendly!) evangelists for gentoo, spreading misinformation and myths. Friendly is good, but knowledge is more important IMO. It just seems that the people with the knowledge get tired of dispensing it to random people on the internet 24/7, and develop a less-than-super-friendly attitude about handing out answers (and rewarding laziness at times), which is understandable.

By the way, I'm not certain if other software management systems do this or not, but if you're interested in running the latest, bleeding edge versions of...whatever...without breaking your old versions, Gentoo's portage system keeps everything in order.

Depends. On debian and netbsd (the two os's I have a decent amount of knowledge about), packages are generally split up when there's a really big version change (like kde2/3, gnome1/2, etc), but smaller changes are seen as a single package, and you can't have multiple versions of that package installed at once. I can't say it has ever been a problem for me.

edit: I forgot to mention that gentoo is a commercial entity, and after the commotion about that one guy forking it (and the associated issues with daniel robbins), it seems to be a bit corrupt IMO. In general I distrust all businesses.

 

[Nothinman]

Those look like the same "RPM" sucks crowd I always see talking about Gentoo, most of them don't even realize apt isn't the package manager on Debian.

but if you're interested in running the latest, bleeding edge versions of...whatever.

But why? Everyone said they want the newest but they don't have a real reason. Unless you're doing development on the software I can't see why you can't stand to be behind a rev or 2 for the sake of stability. I almost never pay attention to the version of anything I have installed except for when something tells me it needs a specific version of something else, and then I usually end up looking and seeing I have that version or higher already.

If you really want new Debian sid is up there for almost everything Galeon CVS builds, Samba 3.0 beta, etc. I can't think of anything that's behind enough that I notice. Debian sarge is only a few weeks behind sid, you can use that and get a little extra QA thrown into your packages.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Agreed, sarge is my perfect mix. The few packages that I care about having super-up-to-date, I either install from unstable, or use unofficial apt sources. The stability of my system is not risked, since they are apps that are totally non-critical, and I can still have bleeding edge, on the rare occasion that I want it.

 

[Nothinman]

The only thing I would like is for Debian packages to be a simple to make as RPM packages, maybe if I actually finish reading through the Debian New Maintainers guide one day it'll make more sense =)

 

[NaughtyusMaximus]

I don't notice a speed difference between Gentoo and Debian on my system, but I do notice that generally the system is more stable with Gentoo than Debian (unstable), and much more so than RH/Mdk.

 

[GL]

About half a year ago I did some pretty comprehensive albeit informal benchmarks of a RH 8.0 system with several packages optimized (I would rebuilt the RPM with P4 optimizations as recommended in the Gentoo documentation). My findings were that the optimizations amounted to no noticeable gain in speed in all packages except glibc. In fact, with some packages, bugs were introduced by the optimizations. With others, compiles would fail using the P4 optimizations. Granted, gcc is not very good at optimizing for the P4. Perhaps, for Athlons and P3s, using Gentoo there is a noticeable gain in speed. One thing I should have tested but did not were things like LAME or video codecs. Those, I speculate would show noticeable performance gains. For things such as Mozilla, KDE and the other K packages, GNOME and the other GNOME packages, optimization had no measurable effect on performance. But I think a lot of the "speed" of Gentoo comes from the placebo effect. Where Gentoo is faster than distros like Red Hat, I would suspect it's because Gentoo has fewer services loaded and running, rather than it being because of the compilation optimizations.

 

[lowtech1]

If efficiency is use for comparision, then what ever distro OS one comfortable with.

I can work for 2 days and upgrade my CPU/RAM to make my system much faster than the poor bastard that could spend a week optimizes there box with Gentoo.

Efficiency is how you optimizes human time.

 

[GandalfGrey]

Personally I prefer gentoo. It really teaches you alot about linux, the community is GREAT (the best distro specific community of any distro IMAO). The packages system is wonderful, although it takes some time to install, the result is well worth it.

Gentoo is fun. That is why I like it the most, I love tweaking and playing with stuff and unless something with a greater tweakability/ease of use combination comes up I am sticking with gentoo

 

[JungleMan1]

Originally posted by: GandalfGrey
Personally I prefer gentoo. It really teaches you alot about linux, the community is GREAT (the best distro specific community of any distro IMAO). The packages system is wonderful, although it takes some time to install, the result is well worth it.

Gentoo is fun. That is why I like it the most, I love tweaking and playing with stuff and unless something with a greater tweakability/ease of use combination comes up I am sticking with gentoo

Do I know you? If you're THE GandalfGrey I know, hey i trade over here often

If you're not, I'll just leave this thread...