Gentoo

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Just clear up the impression of the personal dig, I don't hate Gentoo.  It's 
interesting and amusing, and true to it's "ricer" image it's great fun to 
tinker with and tweak, to solve those little puzzles it's always throwing at 
you.  Sometimes I'm in the mood for that, and I enjoy it.

At other times, though, I require my computer to be a tool I use for work, and 
I don't want to be interrupted and to have to spend two days tracking down 
why sound failed _this_ time, just so I can have tunes while I work.  (Or 
worse yet, why X won't run when I need something that's in an X-based app.)

I think gentoo's advantages are mostly imagined and/or exaggerated.  I notice 
this is frequently from people who like to spread FUD about RedHat, or binary 
distros in general.  While I don't like where the RedHat distros are right 
now, I think they're a very valid, useful, valuable way to do things if you 
just need a system that does it's job.

Unlike a majority of the LUG members, I don't write code, for a living or for 
fun.  I know six mostly obsolete programming languages, and I can make 
scripts do some pretty amazing things, but I don't code.  That means that 
some things that are important to coders aren't as important to me.

I mainly mean to advocate the good qualities of binary distributions in 
general, and RPM based systems in particular.  I mean to correct some of the 
exaggerated claims so that people who haven't tried gentoo or an RPM distro 
aren't misled.