What's your opinion on Gentoo?

[Gyrene]

I'm about to install Gentoo (just to try it out) on my laptop, I'm mainly a BSD user, and as such have become accustom to portage (thus the basis behind me choosing Gentoo). I don't know a whole lot about the different distros of Linux, so I'd like to get everyone's opinion on Gentoo. Is it a good distro? Which ones are better?

 

[Nothinman]

I consider the compiling of everything a waste of time, I've never been a fan of any of the BSD's port systems either. The fact that OpenBSD's snmpd port never worked right on sparc64 didn't boost my confidence either.

I prefer Debian. No long compiles and packages get real maintenance and QA on all architectures Debian supports for instance the Debian X packages still have a bunch of patches in them for odd problems and non-x86 support issues that the upstream authors havn't included yet. Debian feels like a complete system where as most Linux distros and the BSDs feel like just a collection of packages haphazardly thrown together.

As you can tell, I'm biased =)

 

[Soybomb]

I dislike gentoo personally. I'm biased because I'm not a huge linux fan in general. I like freebsd where I have a whole operating system and not a kernel with some other stuff tacked on. I agree with nothinman though, I think compiling it all can be a huge waste of time. I don't like waiting a day to setup a new server. With ports I can install from source or precompiled binaries if I want.

 

[Abzstrak]

I use Gentoo on two of my systems (for about 10 months), and while I really like it for some things, I'm really considering moving over to Debian. Compiling everything is a slow PITA, even on my Barton core 2400MHz.... and while some programs really do run faster, alot do not, and I really dont care that much for the extra trouble involved.

Overall it does provide for a clean system and allows you to customize alot from the get go, rather than going back and changing it after the install like alot of distro's. I think the main thing bugging me is that I built a Redhat 9 box for freevo on a Celeron 1100/512MB/80GB 7200rpm, and its pretty damn fast, and only took about 25 minutes to get up and running.... I really like playing around with Gentoo, however I often get annoyed when I need to get something done and need something else installed and have to wait for a compile (even if its only 5-10 minutes, its still really annoying when you need to get work done)