in the interests of trying to kill off this discussion with a little analysis:

If the question had been "Is Gentoo worthy?", then the answer would have been a clear yes. It might not have been worthwhile for you in some particular context, but it would clearly be worthy.

To know whether it is wortwhile depends on what your aims are, what your capabilities are and there is little info on those.

What advantages might you get, or might you be hoping to get from Gentoo over some other distro(s)? Well there is learning (and you could very easily argue that you would learn more with LFS, if that's your thing...OTOH, if you just wanted something that works, in the short term, this is the wrong approach for you).


infoseeker wrote:
Well, you are right about that, but if all you end up with is parts that don't look right because they are covered with excess glue and badly stuck together, and badly painted, that's not as worthwhile. You might get a buzz from it if your standards are low, but that's not going to last for long.

armanox wrote:
Yes, but its hard to argue from pure time economy; you save a little time every time you boot (& I'm not convinced its all that much compared with another optimised system, although it would be more noticeable compared to a non-optimised system...and most of my systems don't boot all that often), but you don't (usually) make back the bigger investment of time you made in the first instance.

The argument about knowing "everything" can work for some people though; how much of a priority is it to know "everything"?

I disagree and I believe a lot of users of binary-based distros would do so too. I've used Debian for around 6-7 years now continuously and even with the testing branch, I've had very few breakages and fewer problems "maintaining".

The myth that binary-based means more headaches is something that I've never really understood. On the contrary, compiling from source has been a severe headache for me on more than one occasion, because of wrong compile or configure flags. Of course, this is less of a problem on Gentoo where it's all automated, but I disagree generally with that premise in any case.


I know it's still possible to optimize your time this way, but it's still a waste of electricity, energy, CPU time, whatever. I hate leaving my system on at night for whatever reason because where I live there is a tendency for components to get overheated.

And over a period of time, I found myself using Gentoo less and less whenever I found that I needed a new version of a software simply because I couldn't bear to wait for the compilation to finish.

Also when you need to install something quickly, you still have to wait before it completes installing and in some cases it can be several hours wait, which is hardly trivial.

No matter which way I look at it, compiling ALL packages from source is a huge drain of time and CPU.

I'm not here to criticize Gentoo, because really I like it better than say, Slackware. But anybody who wants to use Gentoo should be aware of these issues I've mentioned, otherwise it can be really frustrating.

My ONE and ONLY complaint with Gentoo was the compile times. Everything else about it is fine with me.

I was meerly sharing my story, mind you. Also note that I use Fedora and Slackware on machines on a regular basis, due to convenience. And, in the time since I build Gentoo originally on my Pentium IV, I would say that the time has payed for itself. But, the part that I left out, is that it took almost 30hrs of compiling on the poor system to crank everything out. Could I have taken the time to optimize Slackware or Fedora to do the same performance? Slackware maybe. Fedora I don't know. I think that it would take me longer then 40hrs to trim Fedora down to the response,load, and performance times that I get out of my Gentoo install, at which point I might have some suggestions for the Fedora project next time they want to cut boot times...

I couldn't say it any better
It is alot more complex than a normal prebuild distro but also has its advantages

In fact, and it's the best distro for geeks who want to build a custom distro like LFS but with a pretty pretty good package manager :P

I have always strongly supported Gentoo, and now I do even more so. My father's laptop is the only computer on which I have ever installed any other distro. I won't mention which distro is on it because I don't want to circulate negativity, but it is a binary-based distro. Recently, I went over to do some updates, and they would download, install, but upon completion, nothing had updated. I also had a horrible time getting wicd to start (tons of dependency problems). I credit my Gentoo experience for helping me understand what needed to be done to fix his laptop.