If you like tinkering with your system and become the boss on your machine, Gentoo might be worth trying. I'm using it for quite some time as my main OS after long years of distro-hopping and i won't look back.

Gentoo is not really much more difficult than other distros, but you need to learn a couple of things about sofware (package) management using Gentoo's Portage system, as this thing offers endless flexibility and therefor means going thru' a learning curve at the beginning.

The one other thing is that all software is compiled from sourcecode, therefor software updates for bigger packages take quite a while, so i'd recommend a fast machine in order to keep the fun of it.

The more you get to know about Portage, the closer you move to the captain's seat with this distro. Eventually, if there is any problem regarding Linux or any software installed, if there's a possible solution, Gentoo provides..

..and it's very fast and also bloat-free. You decide what gets installed, not the distro.

Thanks for the info TobiSGD love it!!

Hello Bloody,

wow you really got my interested, Gentoo was always a distro that pop on my ear, mostly because of the reviews I read about it, everyone says the same that it has a hard curve to learn but once you learn it, there is no other distro you want to use and all people that use it are always happy. How you recommend me to start with it? specially about the package management, since it seems to be awesome.

I am trying slackware and I have to say I am really happy with it, and was not as big of a challenge like I thought it will be since, if you are avaliable to manage Debian you can manage Slackware it just changes a couple of things, but, I have to say it runs very smoothly.

I would really like to give some of my time to Gentoo to compare it with Debian and Slackware, so far Slackware is my first choice.

Just a question I know this is a linux forum but, but, I am really interested in secure systems and I have been reading also about OpenBSD it seems to have same effect as Gentoo or Slackware is a OS that when people try it they don't want to change, have anyone ever try it?

Can someone give me some comment about it and how its different between Slackware or Gentoo?

Thanks again everyone, really lerning a lot. I am happy as a hippo !!!

Well, there's a "hardened" (extra-secure) branch for Gentoo Linux, but i never used it myself. About starting with gentoo, i'd suggest to take it one step at a time. You won't learn everything in one day, so i'd suggest to go with the flow. Each time you upgrade your system, the pending changes point out lots of information as to how & why a package is installed/upgraded/replaced, and sometimes there is an issue being pointed out. If it's an important one, you'll receive a news msg which can be read using "eselect news read 1", followed by "eselect news purge" to flush msgs you've already read.

After some time, i've meanwhile created a bunch of small scripts for tasks like system updates, kernel selection/compiling and so on. For example, i always maintain that huge portage tree in a ramdisk and otherwise have it stored as a .tar.gz when i'm not working with portage. Same with the kernel source: mine is a squashfs archive which is mounted during system upgrades and unpacked when i build a kernel. Things like that.

What i really love about gentoo is the sheer endless flexibility when it comes to package management. There's not just one version of a package available, but multiple versions one can easily choose from. Also, gentoo is a rolling distro, but still with a stable and a testing branch, both of which can of course be mixed at will. To mention one example of how far the configurability goes, you can even add your own user-created patches for certain software packages just by putting them in /etc/portage/patches/<package_name>/mypatch01.patch or some such, and the patch(es) will automatically be applied when you install the package..

The main issue I've always had with the BSDs is hardware compatibility, make sure ALL your hardware is compatible before wasting you time on an installation that won't boot. Most BSD websites have a hardware compatibility list you should check, if your hardware isn't listed it probably won't work.

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Arch is great if you want to learn how the system is assembled together, during the installation. Later it's just "pacman -Syu" most of the time. Slackware is excellent for the day-to-day administering. I would stay away from Gentoo; it has its uses, but it takes too long to setup (watching things to compile doesn't make you smarter, you can install Arch four-times instead) and you will learn nothing you wouldn't with Arch except the Gentoo specific bureaucracy like portage and USE flags anyway.

If you want to learn more, maybe start fixing your dependency problems - Libreoffice is in the backports (i have no idea why you pull it from testing) and the rest you can try to compile for your stable. Or go with Slackware.

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Personally think you'll become a better expert Linux user with Slackware. It's akin to Linux from Scatch, has the most minimal package manager (all packages are put together with a script), is more strict about the Linux standard, and full of common sense.

You'll learn most traditional linux commands, how to get into the X window environment (it boots to command prompt by default), scripting, and coding if you get more familiar with a particular language. You can also download the source dvd and have a source tree of slackware on your drive and manipulate it however you want. From there you can re-compile every package with custom cflags (custom script can edit and run every packagename.SlackBuild), change options, or do whatever you want (taught myself a lot of commands, scripting and how a linux system is pieced together this way); if you're new to scripting and manipulating bash commands, you'll learn a lot if you attempt something like this. If something goes wrong with a Slackware install you can re-install original packages off the install disc by booting off the disc and chrooting to your system (always found Slackware to be more fixable and restorable compared to other distros when broken; and I've broken it many times). You can make your own dvd's with custom packages too.

If you use Arch Linux, Gentoo or similar, you can find different ways to learn scripting and commands. Their package managers do all the work for you so if you edit a particular package, you go through the package manager (you'll have to learn their package management system). Also, it might be tough recovering a broken system since they don't include a disc with every package and require the internet (personally broke a system in Gentoo when I did an emerge -e world; couldn't fix it).

If you want to avoid breakage, then be careful with Slackware's package manager. The more I learn about it (by studying the scripts) the more insane it seems to me. It overwrites everything that comes in its way, including changing permission and ownership of existing directories. One bad package can easily break the whole system. It carefully checks for symlinks - and removes them, instead of following them. The postinstall scripts runs rm -rf /path/to/new_link before it creates symlinks. But it doesn't even give a warning before overwriting existing files...

Once I installed one package twice, the only difference was the build-tag. (I forgot that I should have used upgradepkg instead of installpkg.) When I removed one of those packages, it carefully checked and found that another package used some of the files, so I got a message that it left those files in the system. Well, those files were not exactly the same, they only had the same name... Why did it check at removal, but not check for file conflicts at install??? It's ridicules...

Don't get me wrong. I like Slackware because it stays out of the way, and let med do the configuration, instead of trying to guess what I want and try to do it for me. It doesn't hide anything, and it's very "KISS". Except from the lack of security with the package manager, it's a great distro!

Same thing happened to me quite a few times except I used upgradepkg --reinstall (had duplicates with one having the word "upgraded" added); re-installed those packages after removing duplicates. Also broke my desktop when re-installing aaa_ series packages. Didn't know they gather existing libraries to form a package when building them, so I essentially overwrote new-rebuilt libraries with old ones upon re-installation! Lost lib directory at some point and had to get that back (great stuff!). Right now figuring out a script to auto-rebuild and install a package including all dependencies in the right order. Hopefully I don't go blind in the process :P

I take back what I said (literally). If you want a binary distribution go with Arch Linux. You'll have way more time to learn coding, scripting, etc this way. You can do the same thing if you want a source based distribution and go with Gentoo; you need a really fast machine this way though (your system will probably run faster overall after installation as a result), but their community and documentation is the best I've found for learning and getting help in the 4 years or so that I've used Linux (probably the most technical and positive community I've ever seen).

Another satisfied Slackware user is born.

One great way to simplify software installations on Slackware is to install sbopkg, for accessing SlackBuilds.

Also like Slackware myself. It gives you more to swallow compared to anything else I've seen (except LFS). My definite system of choice (I guess).

It's basically LFS already built and setup for you; but it doesn't restrict what you do with it unlike all other distro's (except LFS). If you really decide to be a dedicated Linux user, I don't know if Slackware will be your best bet. You might end up coding, scripting or something else.

IMO new users will feel Slackware is too much. They might be a serial killing terrorist, or someone that worships the devil of course.

I don't see how any distro restricts you. Sure, others give you tools, but you're free to ignore them. You could install Fedora, install the build tools, and then compile all your packages from source without issue. You could manage the entire distro never touching yum, the various system configuration managers, etc. They just make it so that you've got tools for management if you so desire to use them.

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You're right. Didn't realize this but I wasted my time with Slackware. Building from source is the same thing with Gentoo except you don't waste your time managing an entire tree of scripts and you do have better fine grain control from the very start (all you need is a single make.conf file with desired use flags and settings). Way more simple and the scripts in Slackware are so basic you won't even learn C code syntax or anything similar (only seen very few from Alien Bob that have advanced C code like syntax). Slackware doesn't even have any kind of dependency tracking which is a serious let down for building from source.

You do learn more with Gentoo and/or Arch linux in my opinion since you have more time to code and learn other things much faster; at least for those who want to customize their OS. I guess I should've thought that from the beginning. Then there's Fedora and Ubuntu for extreme simplicity and operation out of the box. I guess I'm embarrassed for using Slackware the way I have really...