I’ve been using Gentoo Linux for about a week now and I can say that I’m rather impressed.
In fact, Gentoo is a breath of fresh air for me, a (previously) die-hard Redhat (and then Fedora) fan.
Having to build your own system from scratch and then install exactly what you want is great. Compiling everything from source also gives a great sense of satisfaction except that you must be patient… but you get optimal performance in the end. Another nice aspect of Gentoo is that the downloadable ebuilds (sources + build scripts) are very up to date : Linux kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, KDE 3.2, Mozilla 1.6 etc.
So, for me, Gentoo is a winner ! I give it 10/10 :-)
Of course, we, FreeBSD users, have been doing this since FreeBSD first appeared. Avinash, the “emerge” feature of Gentoo Linux is an exact copy of “make install” on FreeBSD.
(Gee, I start to sound very controversial now :-)
Eddy, you always point that one out whenever the subject crops up :P
I’m a big fan of FreeBSD myself.
[shane@junq:~] $ uname -a
FreeBSD junq.sytes.net 4.9-RELEASE-p5 FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE-p5 #0: Wed Apr 21 13:56:21 WST 2004 :/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/JUNQ i386
FreeBSD 4.10 is in RC2 right now. There will be an RC3 before it is becomes the next production-ready release. The one I am really waiting for is FreeBSD 5.3, when the 5.x branch will be declared stable. FreeBSD 5.x has OpenBSD’s pf firewall, which I want to give a spin.
Maybe I’m just a whistleblower after all. I have not used FreeBSD since 2002. Now?
krabappel:~/Dev/Projects/java/Registry jeyoung$ uname -a
Darwin krabappel.local 7.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.3.0: Fri Mar 5 14:22:55 PST 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.3.15.obj~4/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
krabappel:~/Dev/Projects/java/Registry jeyoung$
Eddy: Too bad that FreeBSD’s support for the PPC architecture isn’t so good right now. I read about your experiment with gentoo on your ibook.
Now, I am really controversial. Read my latest post: http://coding.mu/archives/2004/05/08/linux_will_not_displace_windows_so_soon