In short: Unlike Gentoo, Debian is the official Linux distribution of the Free Software Foundation GNU project. Like Gentoo, Debian is a community-developed and community-supported distribution. Gentoo compiles everything from source, which can take a long time, while Debian apt-get is really fast.
On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 08:17, Mark Gulbrandsen wrote:
> Is debian better than gentoo? Is gentoo better than debian? Why or why
> not?
Debian is no more ``better'' than Gentoo than C is ``better'' than Perl.
In the end, it all really depends on what you're using it for, and what
your own personal preferences are.
> Does apt-get compile from source with custom arch settings?
It can. You can get Debian source packages, and then compile them with
custom compiler settings.
But I tend to say, ``Who cares?'' By unrolling loops a little more,
using a special instruction here or there, or messing with the stack
frame boundaries, you might be able to squeeze a bit more efficiency out
of the code (at the risk of losing stability because of bugs in the
optimization code in the compiler). But in reality, the vast majority of
the optimization takes place dynamically in the processor itself in the
way that memory is addressed and instructions are scheduled for
execution.
> Are there a billion apps available with apt-get like with emerge
> (strictly speaking, portage)?
Gentoo has more packages, because they are less picky about what they
make available. Debian, being the official distro of the GNU project,
includes only Free Software in their ``main'' branch. Then, there are
``contrib'' and ``non-free'' branches also. With all three, you tend to
get anything you would want. You *may* find one or two packages that you
want that are not included in the Debian repository. In these cases, you
can usually find .deb's offered on someone's web site, or you can always
compile them from source (which is what I do with MPlayer).
> How about release cycles? Gentoo always seems to keep up with the latest
> and greatest userland apps.
Debian has multiple release levels: stable, testing, and unstable. If
you absolutely must have the latest and greatest, ``unstable'' is there
for you. But it's called ``unstable'' for a reason. Personally, I run
``stable'' on my work computer and ``testing'' on my home computer.
``unstable'' is really only for those who don't care about whether their
computer crashes or they lose data, and they are doing it to help the
Debian maintainers fix problems with the newer versions.
It is possible to mix and match packages from different branches (I do
that, for example, with ``ant'' on my stable box), but that can get
really ugly really fast if you don't know exactly what you're doing.
> Also, gentoo has every package configured very nicely and in context of
> their system layout. How about debian?
Debian is peerless in this regard.
Mike
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