First I'll start off by claiming that I'm not trying to start a holy war here, distro vs. distro type of thing. I just want to know what it is about Gentoo people seem to love. I've not used it personally but have recently heard quite a few people raving about it. Though at the same time, there are quite a few people going through major frustration. There seems to be a love hate with this distro and was just wondering why?

Thanks

I like it because it gives me a level of flexibility in creating my distro rivalled only by LFS, has a wide variety of up-to-date packages, CFLAGS let me tailor the compilation to my specific system and above all else, it offers the best out of the box support for my nForce2 motherboard of any distro I've encountered to date. There are some disadvantages, such as emerging the entire distribution from Stage 1 over my dial-up connection taking nearly a week and the occasional dud ebuild slipping through the net but these are outweighed enormously by the advantages.

Gentoo is very custumizable, you have much more control of the installation and you complie your own kernel from the start. Of course this can lead to problems if you forget to install support for somethingo on your computer

The only reason i can really think of for the hate angle could be the instability of portage... in it's past the developers have been known to mark as stable a number of packages without sufficient testing which has destroyed a fair few installs. this is very few an far between though, and i'd say that it's certainly worth a go. portage is so so good.

portage portage portage.

no more dependency hunting, and general easy of install. The best example I can think of is mplayer. to install it you just "emerge mplayer" and portage will download fonts, a skin, mplayer, compile the lot from source and install it.

No sweat no fuss. I've been accused of being lazy, but I reckon I've paid my dues, I understand how to configure and install source code, but I cant be bothered anymore

acid is right about dodgy ebuilds though... very recently a stuffed version of gcc was placed in portage. I emerged it and also updated about 10 other packages, as I dont do it very often. It took me about five days to find out what was going on and to recover fully. So now, I'm leaving ebuilds in portage for a few days before I update

I noticed just this week, that pam-login-3.1.2 was in portage, but disappeared some days later.

Bro, rather than speculate about what Gentoo might be like, why not give it a try and see how it suits you? Which distro/ windowmanager/ videocard / etc / etc, is the "best" is an entirely subjective evaluation. Consider it this way: suppose every single response to your post is wildly positive, which convinces you to install it but then you try it and hate it? Or the opposite, everyone says it sucks but you give it a throw anyway, and fall in love with it?

In either scenario, whose opinion would count for more: Yours, or others? I don't know about you, but I'm going to pick the distro that *I* think is best, regardless of what anyone else says. Give Gentoo a shot, see how you like it, and then decide for yourself if it's worthwhile or not. You've got nothing to lose and everything to gain. -- J.W.

There are too many people useing gentoo that shouldn't (you can see it when you read some of the threads - there is hardly ever enough info about the problems encountered to make any sense of it) with too many install options and too many packages being introduced.
If you use unstable and upgrade inportant apps - like gcc you should always have a look at the gentoo forums before you do that or find out how to cleanup the mess later.
There are dependency issues,too.Not gentoo's fault but if you upgrade openssl you'll have to recompile every app that links to it.Happens rarely but when it does you are in for a treat.

Why shouldn't people use gentoo? because they have problems????

People have problems with computers. Thats why we have sites like this one.If we didn't use stuff because we experienced problems, then we wouldn't use computers at all. Hell, I'd have to ditch digital TV, and I would never work again. (support and admin usually, but ops atm)

I personally feel that gentoo is not for beginners, but I am not a beginner anymore, how am I supposed to know how a beginner will take to it?

And I think that the community support is wicked for getntoo. It's way better than the debian lists for example.

im new to linux and have tried several other distrobutions suggested by friends and didnt care much for any of them. i installed gentoo last week and have nothing but good things to say about it. i personally find it very easy for beginners to user and the easy of install and customization make it an overall great distro.

I will do just that. One one of my systems I currently have Mandrake and have tried RedHat, Suse, and Slackware. I like trying new distros. I was just very curious about this one as it seems to have come up out of the blue to be one of the top distros used.

thllgo - I assume you already know this site, but if not, here's a good central place to d/l numerous popular distros: http://www.linuxiso.org -- J.W.

I didn't know that site. Thank you. I like it.