New Gentoo 2007.0 Release Gets Mixed Review

lisah writes "Gentoo's recently released version 2007.0 gets a fair-to-middling review from Linux.com. Installation was a headache from the live CD and DVD versions, but the Gentoo Linux Installer saved the day and gets high marks for being 'far better than it's predecessor.' The user experience is also mixed — on the one hand, the distribution boots quickly, has great hardware support, and new, user-friendly artwork. On the other hand, 'for some strange reason, the installed Gentoo doesn't allow normal users to run any administrative applications.' Overall, it doesn't look like Gentoo offers any compelling reasons to switch to 'Secret Sauce' if they're happy with their current, uh, flavor."

Re:Update difficulties

[LearnToSpell]

You've filed bug reports, right? That definitely sounds unwanted. I'm typing this from the install I did in 2003, and it's up to date.

Re:Gentoo still for do-it-yourself'ers

[Vancorps]

Personally I've always seen the strength of Gentoo in that it teaches you how an OS really works for the most part. You're doing every step along the way assuming a Stage 1 install which is the only Gentoo installs I'll perform. You are building your system from the ground up and with that you learn a lot about the underlying systems that you just won't learn from installing and using Ubuntu.

Of course the speed and optimizations are nice as well, with a Gentoo install the only things running on the systems are applications that you explicitly command it to run. It's a pain and I wouldn't really use it for a general purpose workstation but for some servers its simply great. Of course with Gentoo you have to always wait a bit after every release since every new release has big bugs. That's what testing servers are for though.

In short, I agree with you. There is definitely a place for both.

who cares about the installer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Gentoo on servers because of the flexibility. I can specify exactly what I need. I can generate custom ebuilds easily (they are just shell scripts after all). In fact I can make entire installable custom *distros* for in-house apps and combinations of libraries, etc. I can pin specific packages to specific versions. I can set the build flags for each individual app. I can selectively override the Gentoo-supplied ebuilds with overlays. I can keep track of all my config files and track changes with RCS. I can install multiple versions of PHP, MySQL, Java, whatever, and keep it all straight. This is why I use Gentoo.

I really don't give a shit about a pretty installer. Let Gentoo focus on the power-user niche please, and if you don't like it, use something else.

Where are the Gentoos of yesteryear?

[quarrelinastraw]

I was a gentoo user for 3-4 years and I have to say it was by far my favorite Linux distribution. I'd switch to Ubuntu or Fedora for a couple of days and then just go back because Gentoo offered me so much more flexibility and easier access to packages. Recently, however, I'm switching all of my computers to Kubuntu because Gentoo is just not keeping up with my needs. It breaks my heart but it's true.

The thing that irks me the most is that portage is so horrendously slow. It's beyond painful to use. I switched to paludis and that solved some of the problems, but it's a messy solution for now. Besides, Gentoo no longer has all of the packages I need. I've found myself having to download software from web pages more and more, which was something I wanted to avoid with Gentoo.

Sabayon does a pretty good job of giving me a good setup out of the box, but Gentoo's package management is so messed up now that it's no longer worth that much compiling. Ubuntu used to be noticeably slower for me to use, but either Kubuntu is faster or the gap has been closed and I just prefer the ease of Kubuntu now.

Ahmen: Why Gentoo is not production ready

[theolein]

At my place of work, when I was helping out doing sysadmin last year, I discovered that the current sysadmin is a Gentoo fan, which is ok, except that all the Gentoo boxes were plagued, really plagued with update problems, sometimes showstoppers, but often bugs that required half a day to track down. We could not replicate one setup from one machine to another. It simply did not work. Sometimes I had to fix really bad update problems where something critical, like Apache, MySQL or some obscure PHP package got updated quietly, bringing the service to a screeching halt. Portage is enormously flexible, but it is buggy and some things are simply so painful to do (like the Java JDK setups for Tomcat etc), that it sometimes just doesn't seem worth it (having to write my own entropy generator so that mod_perl would work was mind blowing).

No, in retrospect, I think Gentoo belongs firmly in the realm of the very advanced admin user who only runs one or two services per box. For the rest it is a cool experimental and very educational toy, but I would in future only use Debian (or perhaps the Ubuntu server versions now), or one of the commercial distros (But not SuSE. It's better than RedHat but Novell is going to implode)

Re:And one more thing...

[Andrei D]

And this is a direct consequence of Gentoo's great community, which is perhaps its greatest strength. I for one use Ubuntu nowadays, but I still find it most efficient to google for "gentoo howto dosomestuff" whenever I want to do some linux generic stuff. This query just gives you the best answers.

Re:And one more thing...

[Columcille]

Gentoo community is a good reason to use Gentoo. YMMV, but I've played with other distros and gone to forums or chat rooms for help with some particular problem and the typical response is, "What? WTF do you want to do that? I'm not going to help with that!" Gentoo response is, "What? WTF do you want to do that? Sounds stupid, but if you really want to do it you would..."

Re:Gentoo-Linux-Zealot Translator-o-matic!

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm also getting really tired of bug reports from Gentoo users. They report my app is broken, when it appears they managed to compile KDElibs without SSL, or use a bleeding edge build system which is not supported by stable KDE releases.

If they managed to compile KDElibs without SSL, and if that's something KDElibs allows you to do (easily), then it is not their fault for custom-compiling something, it is your fault for not specifying SSL as a dependency.

As for the bleeding-edge build system, I can understand your frustration, but if (emphasis on if) KDE is moving towards that bleeding-edge system -- if it's actually on the roadmap -- then you should be putting it in your own bleeding-edge builds, too. I hate when we get things like upstart (in Ubuntu Edgy and Feisty) which has all these amazing capabilities, but ends up basically being used for launching runlevels because no developers actually wrote upstart-specific init scripts. (Which is one nice thing I can say for Gentoo; they do tend to always write Gentoo-specific init scripts.)

Now, I don't use Gentoo anymore, don't really like it for a couple of reasons, but if there's anything I hate about Gentoo bug reports, it's the ones I send to the Gentoo guys that get ignored for years at a time.

Re:who cares about the installer?

[WuphonsReach]

Xen is the big one, last time I looked it was still stuck at 3.0.2 (current version is either 3.0.5 or 3.1). IIRC, they were also slow at getting PostgreSQL 8.1 into portage and a few other server-type packages that I needed and had to build my own e-builds for. Not technically difficult, just time consuming.

And I'm tired of building e-builds. At least with other "corporate" (or "server") distros, there are folks who are paid to get stuff packaged and to keep up with recent releases.

Gentoo was a useful learning experience. It has a lot of good things going for it (USE flags and the portage concept and build from source being some of them). It just needs an infusion of corporate level support for the packages most likely to be used in a business.