Gentoo vs. Ubuntu
 

Gentoo is an awesome distribution and the Portage tool is the greatest thing since sliced bread IMO. Portage allows you to customize your software installs and will install dependencies if needed, which saves tons of time since installing software manually can be a huge headache. Gentoo has a definent learning curve to it at first and can drive you crazy sometimes, but it is the ultimate in customization. Although, if you bear through the walkthrough's on Gentoo's website, you will be able to install it; as long as you are patient enough.

Ubuntu is a great beginner's distro and is super easy to install. I recommend this distro if you want a quick install and then learn after the fact. Unless you are running an old computer or are running the PC as a server, the performance gains between Ubuntu and Gentoo are negligable. If like the KDE desktop -I am partial to it- then I recommend you get the specific distribution called Kubuntu. This distro is KDE on Ubuntu and is optimized for KDE.

Slackware is another good distribution and one of the older ones that is out there. I liked it and it offers a good balance of usability and performance.

If your totally anal, get Gentoo. If you just want to get the job done, get Kubuntu. If you want a balance, get Slackware.

Allocate 10 Gig to each and try them all. Pick which suits.
LiveCDs typically do not get you "down and dirty" into configuring your environment.
My testbox (currently) has 9 different distros - some unused for some time, but I don't need the space back yet.
IMHO grub handles this best, but again the Linux community offers you the freedom to choose.
Go play.

Ports is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Portage is just a decent copy ;)

Gentoo vs Ubuntu is a hard call, they're pretty much at opposite ends of the scale.

I've never used Gentoo. I'm typing this from Ubuntu 6.06 x86-64 and it works fine, the interface is the most "polished GNOME version" that I've used. Synaptic is great, and .deb give less problems (...to me) than .rpm ...but that's Debian.

What determined you not to have Debian amongst the finalists?

I took a look at Debian's web site and I just wasn't very impressed. I'd love to just partition up my hard drive but unfortunately (at least for the time being) the install will be on a relatively old laptop that doesn't have room to spare. I think it's more a choice between Gentoo and Slackware now that I've looked at the three respectively. Ubuntu sounds great, but I really want to learn while enjoying Linux. I've heard a lot of complaining about the source installs for Gentoo.. should that be a concern?

gentoo is better than ubuntu by leaps and bounds in my opinion. it allows for the most customization, which is great. but if you really want something great, check out FreeBSD :P

Talk about missing the forest for the trees!


sleepy

How old is the laptop? If it's 1GHz or less then expect to take about a day for the install with X and a window manager. People on older hardware who don't set up their USE flags properly run 'emerge kde' then come post here 2 days later asking why it's not finished yet...

It takes a while but it's certainly controllable if you set the distro up intelligently, think before you just emerge something and take advantage of USE flags.

No offense, but these two are almost complete opposites (in terms of stated goals and targeted audience).

sliced bread
 

Sliced bread is actually not that good. I always buy my bread whole and slice it myself.

to osor:
I'm aware that Ubuntu and Gentoo are at basically opposite ends of the scale. However, I wasn't sure if I should go ahead and stick with the user-friendliness of Ubuntu instead of taking the challenge of Gentoo. Like I said, I've only had experience with LiveCD's and am now trying to install Linux on my Palm device.

to cs-cam:
Well it's not ancient. It's a Compaq Presario 1626. It was my step-dad's when he was taking some college courses a few years ago.

Gentoo really isn't that much of a challenge. If your purpose is learning, I'd go with Slackware.

As for the Debian thing.. check out www.linux.org or kernel.org. Are they flashier or whatever than debian.org? You shouldn't judge operating systems by their websites.

Someone said:

Such statements suggests that the only people who can make good use of Ubuntu are only the beginners. I found this untrue.

If you decide to use Gentoo, use it for it's true benefits, not for the idea itself of having software be fetched, built and installed by portage.

The whole "x distro is better for learning on than y" is a bit misleading. yes, Gentoo and Slackware force you to know more about the process and about your hardware than other distros, but once they're installed, they are identical to every other distro.

Let's use my laptop as an example: Thinkpad r40 with 256meg of RAM. I don't really see much of a speed difference between the two, although I don't tweak it. Once your desktop environment is installed, KDE or Gnome are pretty much the same regardless of you distro.

Install the distro, install the tools you need and you'll find that you can do the same things in each one.

Apples vs Oranges?

It wasn't so much that the website didn't impress me, it was that I couldn't seem to find what made Debian stand out from the rest of the distributions.

Well if they are all the same, is there a distro I can get that's different?

There not all the same. There is about 6 comments in this thread saying that Gentoo and Ubuntu are allmost complete oposites. Including mine.

Ubuntu is IMO a begginers distro, Gentoo, alot more hands on.

However, once a distro is installed most things are simular. The filesystem layout is usually much the same, its just the distro specific tools that are different.

However, if your really want to try something different... why not try one of the BSD's?

Nonetheless, they are my two favourite distros, and I can't believe I'm the only one. Ubuntu is great when I just want to get things up and running quickly, such as at work, whereas Gentoo is what I choose when I want to do a lot of tweaking.

My advice to the OP would be the usual: just try them both and see which you prefer. That said, if Gentoo had been the first distro I'd tried, I think I would have had a lot of problems. A certain amount of background knowledge of Linux is a big help when trying to set up Gentoo for the first time. Once you've got past that initial level of knowledge, it's a good learning experience (in my opinion).

Also, I don't think it's fair to say that beginners are the only ones who appreciate "simple" distros. While I love Gentoo, having spent a lot of time fiddling with it (and also with Slackware) has led me to appreciate the straightforwardness of Ubuntu a lot.

I use both and think they are both amazing. But, for me, Ubuntu is for listening to music, browsing the web and doing the shopping, and gentoo is for messing about with linux and performing magic tricks. But that's not to say that you can't do magic with Ubuntu (or shopping on gentoo), just that I'm more afraid to break Ubuntu. If I break my gentoo install I can fix it, Ubuntu is a lot more opaque to me. But that's ok, because it works and looks beautiful.

I feel I should clarify that when I said 'Ubunta is IMO a begginers distro', I did not at all meen that it was at all a poor choice. Its a great distro, maybe I should have said that its a good distro for a begginner.

If your true intent is a challenge and learning, I would go with LFS. If your intent is to tweak to your heart's content, I would go with Gentoo (or maybe slackware). If your intent is to get a system up and running quickly to roughly how you want it, I would go with Ubuntu (or maybe slackware).

Sadly, different is not always the best choice. It's not that different is bad, it's that it just depends on what you're going to do with linux. i.e. are you putting your box in a production environment.

If you're just playing around with it for the knowledge and experience, does it really matter what distro you are going to use??? Just know this, when it comes to any distro, there is no substitue for reading/searching the manual/documentation/forums/wiki/..etc

I have been using various forms of linux for a while now and I have tried all of the free mainstream distributions that support my hardware. My choices are Debian and Ubuntu. Gentoo is definitely cool and all but in my experience Gentoo was too easy for me to break.

IMHO choose a distro that has a large following and fit's your way of thinking best. You want a well documented system that has an active development team and an active user forum. Such as debian.forums.net or ubuntuforums.org. If you just want different, try a flavor of BSD.

If you don't pick a distro and install it you may never do it. Install Ubuntu or Slackware first. Don't pull your hair out trying to setup Gentoo for your first install. Yes its nothing you can't do, and yes it comes with great install instructions, but a lot of people have trouble with it their first time. Gentoo is great, I use it, I love it. But at the same time I glad I started with Fedora (only to hate in 10 minutes) and then switch to Slackware and Ubutnu. Both of those distros were great for me learn with and have fun with.

As far as Gentoo compiling slowly on old machines. My 1.6Ghz Pentium 4M laptop installs Gentoo in a day assuming I get it right the first time. Do take into account I don't use KDE or Gnome though and those are two of your longest installs through Portage.

so XavierP you're saying that the only major difference between Gentoo, Slackware, and Ubuntu is the way in which they are installed? If so I think I'd go with Gentoo or Slackware just because they're more technical and provide for more learning with the process.

i know arch hasn't been mentioned but it's a small distribution based on slackware, with a cracking package management system pacman. it's i686 optimised and is a unlike gentoo a binary distribution.

i was until about 12 months ago solely a gentoo user but now have 3 boxes running arch and i'm well impressed. i still have gentoo on 1 box but i guess that is just habit!

only a thought
Mike

Both will probably provide greater learning opportunity than Ubuntu during the installation. But, if a technical and learning approach is what you're after, why not try LFS? The other thing you need to consider when choosing between Gentoo and Slackware is the version of the toolchain packages (and other packages) that will be installed by default. Depending on what you plan to do with the machine, it could make a difference.

For example, ATLAS BLAS/LAPACK libraries compiled with GCC-4.X can be 50%-60% slower than when compiled with GCC-3.X. If you're using BLAS/LAPACK to perform roughly 280,320,000,000 calculations during a single simulation, it would result in a huge performance hit. Even if the difference is 0.1usec, that's, theoretically, 8-hours longer on Gentoo than Slackware. Of course, you could apply the patch to gcc-4.1.1 (that Gentoo doesn't apply in their ebuild AFAIK) that eliminates the problem when using x87 rather than sse for floating point mathematics.

On the other hand, if a few nano seconds here and there won't be missed, then Gentoo and Slackware may not provide you any greater learning experience than Ubuntu. Think about how far down into the weeds you want to get and decide if the time (and potential frustation) of a Gentoo or Slackware install is worth it. There's alot of learning that you can do with Ubuntu.

That being said, did I mention Gentoo rocks???!!!

I don't think XavierP would say that, but that assumption is far from true. They all three have differnt install methods, init scripts, package managers, etc.
But XavierP was right, they are all still Linux, and Linux can only be changed so much before its not Linux.

You'll never know till you see for yourself.

By chance, does anyone have a link to this patch or an explanation of the problem?

Alright, well I'm really glad that so many of you guys posted and helped me out. I think I'm going to (for now) go ahead and install Ubuntu until I have at least cursory Linux skills before I try to get too deep into it.

Good choice. Especially to get your feet wet with. Enjoy.

@osor

Here is the bug report. It has a link to the patch in one of the posts and a pretty lengthy discussion of the problem.

Lol, this reminds me of a post I did a long time ago, when I was fairly new to linux and looking for a good distro. Somebody then told me Slackware was the best way to go. I got it running alright in about 2 days, just so I could download and burn Mandrake.

I haven't been following this thread, but from reading the initial post, all I can say is that when I tried Gentoo recently, I couldn't even get it to install! I downloaded the minimal install CD and it logged me right into the console. OKay... then what? So I go and read the "quick" install on the Gentoo website and it requires me to do a million steps manually before installing. I immediately ejected the CD and went back to Ubuntu with its straight forward installation. :p

yeah... god forbid you have to read to install it...:rolleyes:

I wonder what the literacy rate is amount Linux users?

i always found computing exciting (i am a chemist by trade), played with different hardware configurations in the past, water cooling etc but always in windows.

on day (6 months ago) i decided i am bored with playing WOW and bored with windows in general. my gf at the time (wife now) introduced me to macs. soon thereafter i decided to try linux.

i downloaded ubuntu liveCD and tried to install it. took me about 1 week of many trials...what was advertised to be easy turned out to be a nightmare for me. the installation progress was freezing midway, i was getting errors once it finally went through, etc. it finally installed but the problems didnt stop there. my computer was freezing, had problems loading programs, etc. my introduction to linux was definitely rocky and was not sure whether "this is the way linux is supposed to work" which was buggy as hell for me at the time.

i decided - let me try another distro. read through the webstes, asked questions like yours, but never did get a good answer and my lack of knowledge kept me from seeing "the forest past the trees". i decided however to try gentoo (i heard it was the meanest fastest distro out there).

boy...it took me about 1 month to get it to install. gentoo does NOT install from a liveCD properly (even though it has the option). it took me weeks of reinstalling it following the step by step method from the minimalCD. the upside however is that gentoo support from their website is phenomenal. i have solved ~90 of my opened threads.

it was frustrating to hit so many road blocks but now i am quite familiar with it, things make sense and everything runs extremely well. i am in love with gentoo and all the new things i have learned about computing because of it. whenever i have a problem i ask on the forums and it gets explained to me well. i understand it and take note of it for future use. i try to think back of my windows days and i cant believe how limited that OS is.

i hope this helps.

vivat gentoo!

I'm a college student majored in Computer Science. I developed programs in Windows for 2 years. Then approximately one year ago, one of the operating system course required me to develop device drivers for the Linux system. So, I started to use Ubuntu. It was a smooth ride :) However, about six months later, I felt that Ubuntu is not customizable and powerful enough, because the system takes care of may low level details and hide those details from the programmer. In order to really understand the Linux kernel and device driver programming, I began to use one of the best choices -- Gentoo. Got it running in 6 hours with USE flags targeted specifically for Gnome system (with no support for kde, qt, etc.). I have to say that Gentoo is the fastest Linux system I've ever used (other distros I used before include Mandriva, Red Hat, Fedora, Damn Small Linux / Not, Slackware, PCLinux, CentOS). Among all of the distros I've used, I thought Gentoo is the fastest, and Red Hat ranked at the 2nd place, and Ubuntu ranked as the third one.

I'm going to stick with Gentoo and develop more device drivers and other kinds of programs for it :)
I recommend Gentoo to Linux users and programmers at the intermediate or advanced level.

If your old laptop can handle a USB/Firewire external hard drive, you could install Virtualbox (or another virtual machine), install a few other distros within the virtual machine (with the images stored on the external drive), and just test them out that way. Don't expect them to be blazing fast, but you could try them out that way.

However, as was stated before, running Gentoo on older hardware can provide one with alot of reading time while waiting for something to compile (OpenOffice is/was legendary for the required build time, for an example). On the other hand, once the compiles are done it may be possible to pull a little more speed out of older hardware using Gentoo, but that is only a real consideration if binary-only distros (Arch aside) still optimize for the old i386. Whether this is still standard practice among distros like Debian or Slackware is beyond my knowledge. Gains may not be worth the compile times for potentially minor runtime improvements on a system that, for all any of us know, may be RAM and drive I/O bound.

One more thing to consider. If you know someone locally who is willing to be your mentor, use whatever distro (s)he uses. Getting personal help can get you a long way, and you can leverage on their specialized knowledge of their specific distro.

With all of the distro wars you see on this an other forums, you would think only distro "X" is any good. The reality is, most of them are very good and I can recommend any of the mainstream ones. Just because I might dislike a distro doesn't mean I don't recognize that it is perfect for someone else.

That's the beauty of Linux and Open Source Software.

jeremy just has to find a way to allow old threads to stay dead rather than being resurrected all the time ...
And yes, there has been a thread about that too.

Like, say, and autoclosing mechanism after a thread has gone, say, a month without a reply?

Unbuntu- Great distro if you are new and userfriendly
gentoo- I believe it start out as a gaming linux. But more control and experienced usered.

When it comes down to it they are still basicly the same.

You should base your decision on the age of your computer.
Older machines such as the Pentium II's and Pentium III's with low ram do better with a 2.4 series kernel.
2.6 series kernel after 2.6.22 you'll see a performance hit on the older machines
because the scheduler got trashed. Dual core machines will work better with the latest kernel releases: 2.6.31

If you have integrated Intel graphics chip, then you'll want to avoid certain kernels or distributions altogether.

I enjoy having source code to look at things. Find a distribution where it's easy to get the source code.

Slackware comes with it's book on the install media and enough documentation. A lot of software comes with it.

All the source code is on the install DVD or one of the 4 cdroms. If you install something you get the development packages too.

It's installer is prone to working flawlessly if you have a good burn of a cdrom.

For an older machine 10.2 or 12.0.

Newer machines 12.2.

Linux distributions have been going in and out of fashion. Distributions aren't important -- the point is what can you do with your favourite distribution.

I had tried OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Slackware, Redhat, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu, and Debian. Theres not much different. They are all *nix. Newbie should force themselves using command lines, a little scripting, compiling kernel and such. Plus, read more UNIX/Linux books rather than specific distribution. From here, distribution of any kind to try out will be a breeze.

Currently I'm using Ubuntu. I prefer the minimalistic Ubuntu-server(base system) installation. I can have everything I need(fluxbox, mplayer, maxima, latex) within 10 to 15mins plus further customizing for 4 seconds bootup :)

Anyway, Donald Knuth(mathematician and computer scientist) uses Ubuntu. Linus Torvald uses Fedora. So think they are newbie too? :)

I don't really care about the distribution. I just adore the art of linguistics that linux/unix provides :)