Mark Gulbrandsen wrote:
Is debian better than gentoo? Is gentoo better than debian?I hope that everyone would agree that this is not a clear cut case of one being better than the other. It comes down to what do you want? (That is what GNU/Linux is all about... choice!) Personally i use Gentoo on my home machines but i work in the spice lab and we use Debian there. I love both of them and they are my two choices when it comes to linux distro's
Why or whyApt-get is a great utility. There is some functionality in portage that i like more, but one of the biggest advantages of apt is that it doesn't compile the stuff for you, it just grabs it and installs (though you can tell it to download only or you can apt-get the sources and compile them or whatever, it is very versitile)
not? I haven't used debian much, but I can't ever go back to red hat or
mandrake or suse after having used gentoo. Portage makes life so much
easier. But I've heard people rave about apt-get.
Does apt-get compile from source with custom arch settings?No, apt-get doesn't compile anything for you. You can tell it to get the sources (if they are in the tree you have your apt sources pointing to) and then you can compile it however you want.
Are there a billion apps available with apt-get like with emergeAll in all i would say that there is more stuff that you can apt-get. Debian has been around longer than gentoo and the archive is huge so if you include non-free, contrib, non-us, yada yada yada, then there is more stuff than in the gentoo portage tree on ibiblio (or their mirrors)
(strictly speaking, portage)?
How about release cycles? Gentoo always seems to keep up with the latestDebian is trying to get better on their release cycles however if you want cutting edge then you won't get it sticking to Debian stable. BUT you will get a VERY stable release. Even Debian testing will be more stable than many distros. But for example you won't be able to get KDE 3.1 unless you want to download the debs from someone else, or download the source and compile it yourself (i haven't checked if 3.1 is in testing or unstable but i don't believe so.)
and greatest userland apps.
I would say that they are both great distros. I personally have fallen in love with gentoo and i would only use Debian if it is a situation where i can't wait 12 hours for it to compile the latest upgrade to a package, but they are both awesome distros and offer a ton of choice and flexability.
-Chris
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