On Monday, September 29, 2003, at 08:21 AM, Ryan Bowman wrote:
Thanks to those who answered, however, notice in my original post I said 'why do YOU use gentoo', I'm familiar with the 'Use whichever distro you like', hence my question was not 'is gentoo the best', it was 'what are some of the things you like about it'.
Presumably I have Red Hat working on my laptop, so I'll go ahead and install gentoo, in addition to RH and then see if I like it that much. I think it would be beneficial to have only the packages I want on there, since RH installs the world and more. But anyway, I'll probably do it so look forward to many requests for help and advice.
I will chime in with why I personally use Gentoo. This is not to say that Gentoo is the best, so don't take my comments as such.
* Configurability - I install what I want when I want. And by turning on global flags, I get support for the technologies I am interested in. For example, if I turn on XML and KDE in my USE flags, any package I compile that has optional support for KDE or XML will have that support compiled in by default.
* Flexibility - Similar to above, there is a lot of flexibility on what you can install to satisfy requirements. Metapackages and other types of things allow you to install several different packages to satisfy a given requirement. For example, if a package is dependent on cron, you can install dcron, vcron, etc. to satisfy that requirement. The same holds true for system loggers, SMTP programs, etc.
* Fun factor - It's a good learning experience to have so much control over your system. I've also been a big fan of compiling my own software. When using RedHat, I frequently utilize SRC rpm's and then rebuild them on my system to get the software I want to install.
* Manageability - There are so many packages in Gentoo (similar to Debian in that respect) that it's hard to find packages that aren't available. This cuts down on the number of things that will be compiled outside of the package management system, and is a big plus in my opinion.
While many other distributions have some or all of these features, Gentoo has been the best fit for me. So, those are my reasons for using Gentoo.
-- Grant Robinson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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