Switching from Slackware to Gentoo?
 

Could any of you guys give me a couple of good reasons to switch from Slack 10 to Gentoo?
I've been running Slackware for a couple of months now and I'm starting to feel comfortable with it, but now I want something different. Gentoo seems quite neat, but I need some kind of motivation to go through the long and tedious process of installing it (which seems a bit scary). Soooo... Shoot.

Btw, am I blind or is there no Gentoo forum here?

One you get past installing, the difference comes down to one major thing: package management. Slackware has none (good or bad, I'll let you decide) barring some sort of add-on like apt-slack. Gentoo relies on the portage system to fetch the software you need which has some great benefits: no (or significantly reduced) dependency hell, plus you can use portage to upgrade anytime new software comes out, keeping your whole system new, not waiting for a new release of the whole system. One downside: gentoo builds nearly everything from source which can take quite a while. In theory, this makes everything more optimized for your specific system but no one I've ever met can see any difference.

Gentoo's installation is a pain. I never got through it myself since I wanted to do the full compile. I gave up after a day and a half when I thought I messed up and might have to start over again.

I just recently installed Gentoo, and I didn't mind it that much. Yeah, it takes a while, but if you install from a stage 3, you can have a functional(sort of) system in a few hours. The long part is installing all the other stuff, like GUIs.

Also, i'm guessing that there's no Gentoo forum since gentoo.org already has a forum.

If you want good reasons to switch, portage is an excellent reason. Granted, everything's compiled from source, but there's always the option to use binary packages if you're willing to go find them first. The installation really isn't that bad, there's an excellent guide on gentoo.org, which not only tells you what to do, but why you're doing it.

Correct, there is no Gentoo forum here, but that decision is up to Gentoo rather than LQ. As has already been discussed in great detail in previous threads the ball is in Gentoo's court.

Personally, I was (and continue to be) impressed by the Gentoo philosophy statement, but in my case, after spending an entire weekend banging my head against the wall trying to install it (unsuccessfully), I decided it was an inefficient use of my time. Clearly there are a lot of very satisfied Gentoo users out there, unfortunately for me, my experiment with it just didn't work out.

Don't let that discourage you though; by all means, gaining experience with any distro is valuable. If this is something you are considering, by all means give it a shot. Worst case scenario is that you decide that it (or any other distro) isn't worth it, which is no big deal. You can always hold on to what you're running now, and fall back to it if necessary. I say Go For It, and good luck with it -- J.W.

i installed from stage 1 Gentoo without to much trouble

the main hard parts i found was getting the network card to work so i could download the stage 1 tarball (i had to load the driver by hand, just took a few hours and a small cheap NIC to get by that part ... altho i did use the minimal live CD, so maybe the bigger one can actually do more) ... the other hard part was correctly configuring the kernel :)

once me got past the bootstrap (this takes forever!, granted it only takes a few hours or so to do it once, but most of the time it randomly fails (it installed glibc, and it can sometimes make break the entire system, reacquiring you unpack the tarball and run the bootstrap scripts again.. it should work in about 5 try max tho :) )

once the bootstrap is complete the rest is a breeze if you know how to use the system (read there on-line docs, almost everything you'll need to know)

once everything is configured up, and ready.. there really no fuss i found

well, except that the portage tree doesn't have every package ever made ... but its growing .. at least 10 packages a day are added usually from what i can see

Re: Switching from Slackware to Gentoo?
 

Check out the official forum at gentoo.org. It´s extremely good.

Thanks for your input ppl, I'll give this some more thought though, since I already have a very good system (except I never got my geforce to work properly) that fills my needs and preferences :)