Just getting around to reading this 59 post. Thread. Interesting. Thanks!
On 12/18/06, Neil Bothwick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Mon, 18 Dec 2006 10:54:06 -0800, Grant wrote: > I'm thinking this over a bit more, and it seems like the best thing > for Gentoo (or any distro) is a lot of users. More users must mean > more active developers, and more active developers must mean an > increased rate of growth for the software. "must mean"? Why? The only thing more users must mean is more users. If you maintain the proportion of users-who-would-become-devs to always-users your point may have some validity, but the ratio always drops when a distro becomes popular. More users often means more work for the same number of devs, it can be counter-productive.
This is very true.
> I believe the great benefit of Gentoo is its flexibility, and > flexibility is like a meta-benefit because it makes possible any other > benefit. What do you think makes Ubuntu the distro of the moment? Is > it ease-of-use? If Gentoo focused more on ease-of-use aspects of the > Ubuntu variety, they would attract more users and thereby increase the > rate of growth for the software. Do we really need yet another easy to use distro? There are already more than enough of those. Gentoo is for those who want maximum control over their systems and are prepared to make the effort to achieve this. This is for a different type of user. Turn Gentoo into yet another easy-to-use distro and those people lose while those wanting ease of use gain very little.
I agree again. The ONLY problem I'm having with Gentoo is the devs removing older revs of things from portage. (ati-drivers, MythTV, etc.) My older, somewhat specialized MYthTV frontends are boxes that require specific kernel+ati-drivers combos to get SVideo to work. I've found that when I need to upgrade these I find that the version of ati-drivers that I'm currently using is no longer in portage. I lost SVideo output on both my boxes for this reason and had to switch to composite vidio. Bummer. On those machines I'm seemingly forced to use ati-drivers because the xorg ATI drivers only support VGA output on my ATI9200/Pundit-R machines.
I really don't care if Gentoo is considered a minority distro, it is not, and hopefully never will be, a mass market product.
I'd prefer it did not. I still love Gentoo. It's easily the most stable distro I've ever run. (RH & Suse here.) The support from the devs has been second to none. - Mark
-- Neil Bothwick When you finally buy enough memory, you will not have enough disk space. -- Murphy's Computer Laws n°3
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