Hi!

This question came to my mind because I can't decide whether to use Gentoo or Arch Linux. I tried both, but I'm also looking for reviews of both distributions, and all the older ones (around 2004 and before) say that Gentoo is cool because it's bleeding edge. Well...compared to Arch I think it's really a false statement. I don't know how things were going around Gentoo a few years ago, so can someone tell me, someone who has been using (used) it for years (years ago) , was gentoo more bleeding edge than nowadays?
Another thing that came to my mind: I've read a lot of comments and posts is different forums about and from people who decided to use Arch instead of linux, and they were saying that they migrated to Arch not just because of the long compiling times of Gentoo, but also because of some kind of change in the way of things work around the development of Gentoo? What were they writing about? I haven't found anything on the web.
Thanks in advance.

Balazs

Well, I can't say as to which is more bleeding edge now a days as I run Debian Lenny (the stable boring non-bleeding edge one). But I do recall some news in the past couple years about some communication problems between users and different developers, as well as a problem with the non-profit status due to inaction by some of the board members. Development is still ongoing, but it wouldn't surprise me if it had slowed down a bit during the turbulence.

Gentoo is just as 'bleeding edge' (whatever that might mean to you) as you make it. It is not a distro were you just sit and watch your autoupdater run in the system tray. Surely a lot of packages are not as bleeding edge as they were a year ago, surely some others are more bleeding edge than they were one year ago. You know, it all comes down to how well maintained a given package set is. If you want something more, just get involved and help to get your favorite software into proper shape in portage.

This is the thing that amazes me the most. People complaining about compile times in Gentoo must be really bored people. It's like complaining because you get wet when you get into a pool... Meaningless, senseless and cheap speech. If you don't want to suffer from long compile times don't use a source distro.

People complain from time to time. Gentoo is no exception, every distro has its own set of fans and detractors. In my experience, Gentoo is only getting better, but that's my -probably- highly biased perception. I usually just ignore all that speech. Just try and decide yourself. If arch is good for you there's absolutely no reason why you should try to convince yourself that Gentoo is better, or the other way around. Such is the beauty of freedom

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Yes, I agree. Gentoo is a source based distro. Actually sometimes referred to as a meta distribution. Basically you make your own distro from the configuration options in Gentoo. Hence is compiles everything you install (there are a handfull of binaries available for openoffice and firefox and a few other things). If you have a decent CPU its fine. Or a life; I leave my machine to compile over night. I don't tend to want to sit up gaming, and I have work most of the day so its plenty of time for the machine to sit there and do things.

Gentoo is one happy family. Bit of arguments in every family though, thats just healthy.

In terms of bleeding edge its all up to you, as mentioned above. There are 3 levels if you like. You have software marked as stable, and you have software marked as unstable. The unstable is not that unstable (e.g. gnome 2.28 is still regarded as unstable because it has some bugs against it still). The third level is the testing repositories (called overlays)where software come as soon as it is out. So its up to you to choose where to install from.

Mons

You can also try out Paludis/playman and get some REALLY bleeding edge stuff, such as the KDE SVN ebuilds.

Definitely Gentoo. Source-based is way cooler! In my experience with multiple distros, Gentoo is more "bleeding-edge" in the sense that you almost always have access to the latest stable release, whereas in binary distros they are usually months behind. But Gentoo also masks out untested packages.

It only depends on what do you exactly want from a distro.

If you need a source distro, then use Gentoo. If you want a binary distro that has easy means to compile from source *some* (a few) packages, then use Arch.

For my concern, if someone use a Gentoo ~arch box with a at least one overlay, then I consider it a bleeding edge box :P

And on my box, I use a ~amd64 Gentoo box with KDE 4.4 and I don't even use overlays :P

What do you mean "a few"? The Arch Build System is a ports like system with build scripts for all packages in the distro. You can fairly easily rebuild the whole distro from source if you want, and tools like bauerbill make it even easier.

You can rebuild the whole distro from source if you use Mandriva as well. That doesn't mean that I consider Mandriva a friendly distro when it comes to handling source packages. As nice as it might seem to you (and as respectable as your opinion is, of course) the Arch ABS or Mandriva SRPMs just can't be compared to Gentoo ebuilds.

So I still stand. If you plan to use only source there's no point in using a distro that's mainly a binary distro. You are not going to find the same degree of support either if something goes wrong (and it will at one point or another), or when a package fails to compile due to wrong dependencies.

I don't disagree with you here. If you want to deal all in source you should probably use Gentoo or Crux.

This is where I disagree. (Well, not about Mandriva.) Arch PKGBUILDs are very similar to Gentoo's ebuilds. To grab a random example, compare the build scripts for rtorrent. Gentoo rtorrent vs Arch rtorrent.

Rebuild whole system with custom CFLAGS? Edit /etc/makepkg.conf with your changes. Install the pacbuilder script.
Do
There are multiple ways to do this. Also the Arch PKGBUILD scripts are quite similar to Gentoo's ebuilds - they're both pretty straighforward and easy to hack as needed. Gentoo probably has an advantage with their USE flags, though.

And of course, almost anytime you install something from the Arch User Repo, you're building it from source. I have 40 packages built from source on my system currently, all from the AUR. Which I would classify as not a lot, but more than a few. If you use Arch, you will almost certainly be compiling some things from source, possibly a lot, and there are simple and effective tools for dealing with that.

I might agree that PKGBUILDs have similar potential , after all they are both shell scripts, and nothing else ultimately. But at the current stage they are nowhere near ebuilds in my opinion. For many reasons.

First, portage is quite mature and has much more functionality on it (whether that's good or bad is another matter, it depends on whom do you ask, I guess). To continue with, there are the USE flags as you pointed out, which are much more than just a way to selectively enable dependencies. They can do virtually anything. To follow with, the code base of portage is quite big, the functionality of ebuilds is not limited to the ebuild itself, they inherit big chunks of code from eclasses and I've never seen something similar in PKGBUILDs (not that I am an expert at these, so correct me if I am wrong). Admittedly, it's been some times since I last tried Arch, so it's more than probable that I am missing something here.

I am quite sure that Arch is a very good distro. I've used it myself in the past. However it would not be the first option for me when I need to build a source-based system (the whole of it). 40 packages might seem not "a few" to you. But they are a few on a regular desktop system. On Gentoo I have more than 800 packages installed, and I don't even use KDE or Gnome, and I cut down everything I don't need (again, USE flags to the rescue), so my system don't even qualify as an average desktop. It's minimal by nowadays standards for a desktop system. On a server things are different. On my home server (also Gentoo based) I have around 200 packages, but then there's no need for X on it.

Sure it's possible to build a whole source based OS using Arch, however, not having the USE flags will add enough pain to it because that means no optional dependencies, which in turn means that you are going to end installing much more software than you really need. That's not a good thing on a source based system. In a binary system installing 400 extra packages means barely 5 more minutes, on a source distro that can be quite some time, and a lot of extra power wasted. That is, unless you plan to hack 800 PKGBUILDs to adapt the dependencies to your taste.

No, I'm not aware of something analogous to Gentoo's eclasses. But again, I'm not disagreeing with you that if you want source based, Gentoo is for most people a better option than Arch.

I'm saying that Arch is closer to Gentoo in spirit and ability than it is to Mandriva or Ubuntu. That you can, with far less effort than a Mandriva or Ubuntu, rebuild the whole system from source. Now, if you have very specific needs, Gentoo probably offer an easier way to customize such a large number of source packages. If you're fine with some sane defaults, you can rebuild the whole Arch system without much effort as I showed above.

I realize that 40 packages is not many compared to the total number of installed packages. In fact, I said it was "not a lot". This was in reference to your first post, regarding the "*some* (a few)". I'm just trying to say that Arch does have a powerful, simple framework for dealing with compiling from source and rebuilding packages to fit your needs. That you can maintain a system with 40 or 400 source based packages if you like, and it isn't particularly difficult to do so. You can do optional dependencies with the Arch PKGBUILD, but I think it's slightly more involved. I don't believe there is a universal USE type setting, where you could say, build all packages without X11 support. You would have to edit each individual script.

I'm in no way disparaging Gentoo or saying Arch is better, though. Just pointing out, in reference to your original post, that Arch is competent to deal with rebuilding and managing source packages. Maybe not to the extent Gentoo is, but certainly moreso than most other distros. I think Arch falls into sort of a middle ground between Gentoo and Slackware.

And 800 packages for a minimal system? My desktop computer running openbox only has 533 packages.

At the end of the day we mostly agree, I think.

I guess it depends on the concrete needs. I use fvwm as my usual WM. I have Xfce installed only to toy with it, but I don't think it represents more than 20 or 25 extra packages at most. X alone is above 60 and I have almost 50 packages of a basic kde install around to be able to run systemsettings and k3b. I have enabled support for almost any available media format, so in media-libs I have more than 90 packages installed. For the rest the core system I use is not too heavy. I am mostly an fvwm/urxvt/mc/bash user. Firefox or seamonkey depending on the moment are the two graphical programs I use, besides mplayer from command line and occasionally some gimping.

In Gentoo is not strange to have lots of packages, since the modularity is probably more fine grained than in other distros (there are no -dev packages though, because of its source nature).

I have had Gentoo desktops with much less packages, it's perfectly possible. I just wanted to show that 40 packages is only a small (although important) portion of the OS, it doesn't really matter if your OS have 500, 800 or 2000 packages for what I wanted to illustrate. But, as you already cleared out, we were talking about different things, since you didn't mean to imply that building a whole system from source with Arch was the nicer way to get a source based OS.