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Pretty similar with me. I had an 18 to 24 month fling with Gentoo. What drew me in was the whole concept of compiling everything on my own system for optimization, but ironically what threw me out was the whole concept of compiling everything on my own system for optimization.

After using Gentoo for a while, I just got sick of those multi-hour compiles when a new Firefox + Thunderbird update was released. And the fact was, I could not perceive a performance advantage. I don't care if there is some microscopic performance advantage that requires benchmarking tools to even be able to verify. The real world, day to day usage proved to me there was no performance advantage.

Plus - as I got more interested in OpenBSD, I became much more keen to the notion of using precompiled binaries. Keep your production system *clean* and *lean* ... free from compilers, free from source code, and so on.

Some of the points that really made me change my mind about Gentoo (and compiling in general):

* In the vast majority of cases, you won't see any performance advantage. An i686 optimized version of notepad.exe isn't going to "perform" any better than an i386 optimized version of notepad.exe for the reason that most applications spend most of their cycles waiting on user input.

* In the event that an application does benefit from CPU optimizations (such as the Linux kernel), the distribution will provide an optimized version for you.

* When you are running your own compilations, *you* are the only person testing that program. When you run the same binary that the other 1000's of Debian/Ubuntu/RedHat users are running, you share the benefit of getting updates to that binary should a bug or security issue be located.

I could go on, but those are the key points.

I've pretty much done a 180 - I now have a love affair with binary systems for any kind of production. (Including Desktop systems, workstations, and especially servers.) I read a great line in my Absolute OpenBSD book ... it goes something like this. "Hackers love it when you have a working compiler on your server. It makes their life that much easier."

Wow you sure got Gentoo totally the wrong way :O Gentoo isn't about optimizing everything with some magical compiler parameters and somehow magically having a whole lot faster distro than everyone else...It's about being able to customize everything for specifically yourself and your machine. I have been using Gentoo for years and there just simply isn't anything that could draw me away from it. F.ex. I can install MPlayer with exactly the features I want, but on the binary distros you're stuck with what they provide you.. Oh, and just to say something about those optimizations: no, optimizing and tweaking some GUI app won't mean much but if you're for example running Apache.....Having Apache optimized for the hardware it is running on will benefit a lot more. I instruct gcc to optimize my server software for max speed whereas I instruct gcc to optimize my GUI apps for size. The smaller size the binaries are the faster they load and less memory is used, you know? But on a binary distro you don't have that kind of a power.

EDIT: Just thought to add here that I see it kind of stupid to be compiling new software every day...I usually sync portage tree once every two weeks and update everything then. I'll just leave it compiling them while I'm out of home or sleeping.

Edited 2007-12-16 11:36

Right. IIRC if you just install Ubuntu, it doesn't even play DVD or even mp3 (last time I tried) with its media player(totem)...

In Gentoo, I can even build desktop systems that fits much better suited for me than any other distro, because my media player WILL play everything I want it to play...(dvd, flac, mp3) not like stripped down half useless thing just because the distro maker's decision about license or whatever there is about it that won't let you play the damn file you own...

And on binary distro these problems will start causing 3rd party repos to spawn here and there, having them say 'we have the more working and leading edge apps' and will start to lead into further problems, since those are run by small amount of people and will not get the proper maintenance as much as the official repos.

I just don't know when people say 'Gentoo is going downhill'. It might mean 'not getting as much publicity as it used to', because people know Gentoo by now and hype about source based distro and compilation magic is over... IMHO, it's still the hottest distro out there.

I may be insulting but other 'easier' binary distro will cause random newbies to start posting so much questions and answers on the net that google results tend to bury the real technical questions but tend to show random newbie posts that make you sigh... but when it comes to gentoo, forum/wiki/just plain google results are full of technical helpful documents and that's another part that I like Gentoo about. gentoo-wiki.com is a great stuff.

Right. IIRC if you just install Ubuntu, it doesn't even play DVD or even mp3 (last time I tried) with its media player(totem)...

If you just install Gentoo it does absolutely nothing. Do get it to play dvds, flac and mp3s you have to install a media player and the correct codecs. In Ubuntu the media player comes pre-installed by default and all you have to do is add codecs for whatever you want. And adding those codecs is very trivial, certainly as easy as using portage and probably much easier. Claiming that getting a media player to play mp3s is easier with gentoo than Ubuntun, simply isn't true.

(another ex-gentoo user, also an ex ubuntu user)

Well put, WereCatf!

I've been using gentoo for more than two years now and I have no intention to leave. It gives me the freedom of LFS without the administrative hassle

Oh, and why bother with daily compilation? I use glsa-check mostly, and every now and then an update of world (one can usually skip the glsa-check if you update more than once a month).

you do know you can install binaries via portage as well as compile right? for those big apps if you don't have the power to compile (or time) just use a binary.

[quote]
I've pretty much done a 180 - I now have a love affair with binary systems for any kind of production. (Including Desktop systems, workstations, and especially servers.) I read a great line in my Absolute OpenBSD book ... it goes something like this. "Hackers love it when you have a working compiler on your server. It makes their life that much easier."[/quote]

You could always build the packages elsewhere, then emerge --usepkgonly on the production server.

I followed the same path you did... Gentoo was my introduction to Linux on the desktop (2003-2005) and I ended up giving up on it not because of Portage and breakage, but that setting up things like sound servers and automounting was just getting to be a major hassle, that and the pressure to keep updated and compiling all the time. Went to Ubuntu, and nearly made a fool out of myself trying to tweak everything the Gentoo way...

On the other hand, at the same time (and for a few months after I switched my own machine) I was maintaining a very old, very slow computer for general use around the department. It was a Pentium II 333 MHz machine, but with a bit of care it was usually running faster than the 1.8 GHz Pentium IV computers we had running Windows XP.

It's not the compile-time optimizations that made it fast, it's that Gentoo allowed me to be very selective about what software I installed. I used a kernel that only had built-in drivers for the hardware in the machine, no sound system, XFCE 4.2, Firefox, OpenOffice (which was admittedly dog slow) and very few other things. Gentoo is great if you know exactly what you want the computer to do (and probably even better if you can just set it up and forget about it)

The other thing I will say for Gentoo is, if you want to compile a newer version of a program (say, for beta testing or because you need it and it's not in a repository), it was much easier to do so on a Gentoo system, since you were guaranteed to have a compiler and all the header files for everything on your system.

I hope Gentoo gets out of its current slump (granted, since I haven't heard much about it lately it must have abated or entered a less-newsworthy phase), and I hope Paludis works. I remember reading about Paludis back when I used Gentoo (so this is not a new thing either), and I remember Ciaran being... well, acerbic and opinionated, arguing with the other developers. Hopefully things have changed for the better since then.

Heh, these days setting up sound servers and automounting is done for you quite automagically (well, with the proper use flags that is :p ).

But I can remember in the beginning. Back then automounting worked rather randomly.

gentoo is quite newsworthy but the very rolling structure of gentoo means releases don't make much sense and as such there aren't any of those to talk about. But that doesn't mean gentoo isn't taking big strides constantly. It is just done without fanfare.

The Fedora and Ubuntu-devs tend to scream out loud everytime they fix a detail, gentoo-devs just post a reply in a bug-report when a detail is fixed. And then we all rejoice

I had a 5-year Gentoo phase, starting toward the very beginning, in late 2001, before the 1.0 release.

I wasn't drawn by the source-based aspects, but rather the meta-distribution aspects. I thought that Gentoo was the heir-apparent mother distribution to succeed Debian and become the technical underpinning of myriad binary distributions--the standard make-you-own distribution toolkit.

The Gentoo Forums were legendary. The community was vibrant, full of knowledgable and helpful people. The project had a unique vision and direction. Then Daniel Robbins decided to cut the project loose to fly on its own. It was a slow, painful decline from that point on.

The binary distributions based on Gentoo never materialized until Sabayon, which isn't really a binary distribution of Gentoo so much as a Stage 4. Portage wasn't scaling well with the explosive growth of the tree, and although its performance improved, progress was sporadic and transistions were often complicated.

It was death by growing pains, predominantly because Gentoo didn't offer a binary derivative to appeal to the crowd that thinks they're hobbyists but really just wants a distribution that makes a bit more sense under the covers. Gentoo attracted a userbase it didn't want and couldn't satisfy.

Gentoo is a great idea that never really fulfilled its promising potential, and the Debian/Ubuntu ecosystem has really picked up the slack. I wish my Ubuntu systems were really Gentoo under the covers. I wish I had emerge and rc-update. But it's not worth the effort anymore to deal with Gentoo. Ubuntu is "good enough".

And the gentoo view is that Ubuntu is an african word meaning 'Gentoo is too hard'

gentoo is still among the biggest distributions and is still moving forward. But the distribution and the userbase have matured and become boring in the eyes of the "leet" persons. But the rest of us just want something that works and does what we want it to, when we want it to. And gentoo does that.

"It was death by growing pains, predominantly because Gentoo didn't offer a binary derivative to appeal to the crowd that thinks they're hobbyists but really just wants a distribution that makes a bit more sense under the covers."

This just doesn't make any sense: why would Gentoo need to offer a binary distro based on itself? That's like saying that Microsoft failed because they never opened up their source code. Microsoft isn't about opening up its code and Gentoo isn't about being a binary distro.

Because there's an obvious demand for a binary distro based on Gentoo. The Gentoo Project doesn't necessarily need to be the steward of such a derivative. Think more along the lines of the Debian/Ubuntu relationship. Genbuntoo, if you will.

Sorry, but if you want Gentoo you will have to build it the old fashioned way-the way it was meant to be. You are defeating the core purpose of Gentoo with this idiotic idea of Genbuntoo.

Dammit, the original poster already explained this and you still cannot parse his logic. If you want *buntu install THAT!

"Because there's an obvious demand for a binary distro based on Gentoo."

Umm... But Gentoo isn't a binary distro. To take full advantage of Gentoo's features, the derived distro would _absolutely_ have to be source-based. How can you have the awesomeness that is conditional compilation in a binary distro? I mean, think about this -- the package in question has about 50 use flags, which means, that there are (2 to the power of 50) ways to compile it, right? A binary package maintainer for such distro would have to maintain an insane amount of package variations -- like a quadrillion or so.

My point is: what exactly do you mean by "Gentoo-based binary distro"? Optimizations? Gentoo isn't about CFLAGS, really. USE flags? Fine, but how can one implement every possible USE flag configuration for a given package?

You're missing the point. In a binary distribution based on Gentoo, the packages would be prebuilt with a default make.conf. The user would have the option of building from source with custom CFLAGS/USE if they wish, but most users would be fine with the binary package most of the time.

It would be just like regular Gentoo, except you have the option (possibly the default) to install binary packages built with fairly conservative CFLAGS and fairly inclusive USE flags.

If you're familiar with Arch Linux, imagine more of that kind of binary/source hybrid packaging concept but based on Gentoo's ebuild tree, Portage/Paludis package management, and the rest of the Gentoo platform.

Yes the portage system does have a lot of issues. But the .ebuild system works out pretty well.

The issue I have with Paludis is that its complicated to use, unlike emerge. And once you start using paludis, you cant go back to emerge/portage. It doesn't sync what you have installed / updated on the system.

As far as it said it built fine, and doesn't run issue(which I haven't had) you can turn on build testing.
And the newer emerge/portage system has gotten much better at checking for a lot of other misc issues. Like testing to see if the current emerge will overwrite other packages file.

Another big thing I see a lot of people bitch about is when theres a major update to a critical package like Apache. If they where just to check the front page, the dev's put out notices weeks in advance.

Yes emerge/portage does need a lot of help, It just needs to be redone, ether c/c++ or just stop using flat files for everything. Which is the issue with me, its dog slow, even on a 10K RPM drive. Use sqlite damn it!

My next box will be a mac, but ill always have a Gentoo box around. And I use Gentoo at our colo, need all the performance possible, and RHEL/SuSE/CentOS just doesn't cut it.

3.75 years of Gentoo. http://gentoo-install.com

I use Gentoo at our colo, need all the performance possible, and RHEL/SuSE/CentOS just doesn't cut it.

Do you have any sort of benchmarks as to where Gentoo gets things done, but RHEL/SuSE/CentOS doesn't cut it? I've heard plenty of people make this claim, but no has ever substanciated it.

I actually did my own bench marks between Gentoo and Red Hat a few years ago, when trying to decide which OS to use on a server, and found no performance differences at all, once I made sure all the software was of the same version and was configured the same.

I actually did my own bench marks between Gentoo and Red Hat a few years ago, when trying to decide which OS to use on a server, and found no performance differences at all, once I made sure all the software was of the same version and was configured the same.

Care to enlighten us how did you actually benchmark and what?

A bunch of file transfere tests (samba, nfs and ftp) timed with a stopwatch. Some Apache benchmarking tool that I can't remember. Some SQL queries that we used a lot, run on a copy of actual data from our database. There may have been something else.

If I recall correctly, gentoo won one of the benchmarks first time around, but that turned out to be simply because it had a newer version of some program than Red Hat. Once I installed the same version on Red Hat the difference disappeared.

You probably know this already, but what helped me a LOT was making a separate partition and format it to ReiserFS for /usr/portage. The difference is huge. Now portage isn't particularly fast, but it's not really slow either. Hope this helps you or someone else.

Yes the portage system does have a lot of issues. But the .ebuild system works out pretty well.

The issue I have with Paludis is that its complicated to use, unlike emerge. And once

I love the prospect of Paludis written in C++

I still remember how underwhelmed I was when hearing about this the first time. Before condemning the choice of language, I tried to find out why they chose C++ to begin with. This is what they say on their FAQ:

Because we don't have the time or the manpower to write it in C.

However, as python would have allowed them to write Paludis ridiculously faster than using C++, that line of reasoning seemed questionable. Especially as emerge was itself written in python. Poking around the website, I also came across this item on their list of features:

Low dependency bloat. No Python, no big external crypto libraries.

So I assumed the "bloat" aspect was another rationale. But given the advantages of Python, I find it hard to take that argument seriously. Apparently, McCreesh now also said the following about scripting languages in the article:

The tradeoffs, of course, being a much lower level of static checking, a much higher risk of buggy code slipping through and much higher testing requirements to meet release standards ...

Since when does C++ deliver reduced risk of buggy code slipping through when compared to, say, Python? This fantastic claim seems to contradict common sense. Choosing the right language for the job is important, and C++ has always seemed to me as a horrible choice. Everything they say to rationalize their choice simply acerbates this impression.

Maybe just love C++ like me?

Maybe its all about having fun with what you are good at?

There is no need for people these days to stand idle and have a language pissing match - there is way too much choice these days, so you just pick what you think will do you well at.

I congratulate the authors of Paludis because they have done something that clearly they love without compromising on their dream to improve Gentoo. Even I can't make that claim

You catch a great deal of errors at compile time.

You can compile python source.

the simple fact is, python allows ALOT more weird errors to happen because it doesent require as much from the developer as c++, and as stuff builds up, its just harder to know wtf is going on, if the application is written in python, and someone made an ugly mistake.

"Since when does C++ deliver reduced risk of buggy code slipping through when compared to, say, Python?"

The curse of C++ is to forever be judged negatively by people who have no idea what the language is about.

C++ is all about static typing and catching as many error as possible at compilation time (as in, many things that would not work or lead to bugs shouldn't compile).

Of course, since it's backward compatible with C it also provides many ways to force your bad code through and many unsafe legacy alternative ways to do things (pointer arithmetic, c-style arrays, managing strings as manually allocated byte arrays etc.) that people incorrectly consider the "normal" way to do things in C++.

If people stopped considering C++ as "C with additional stuff" and teaching it as such, maybe more people would see the language for what it is.

You have a problem with malloc? You probably believe such low level thing as bitwise AND (&) and OR (|) and bit shifts are bad? Let me guess, binary and hexidecimal are bad too? I think most C++ zealots are insecure about low-level computing concepts and want them to go away.

Please don't act like an idiot.. The parent never complained about malloc nor implied anywhere that doing bitwise operations is evil.. >_< He just probably meant that these a lot cleaner ways to handle strings than doing mallocs and managing the memory yourself. You do realize that it makes the code less readable and produces more code..?

PS. I happen to use C myself but that's just my taste. I still don't attack C++ users like you do.

Of course it will catch as many error as possible, but when you compare python with C++ (or any compile vs runtime language), it's not accurate to say that all the errors you'll find will be somewhere undetected in a python program.

Just to bring one, there's many type in C++ that needed to be check where in python it doesn't matter at all. Like integer, in C++ the compiler need to check for int, long, unsigned, etc. In python, who cares? it's an integer. If you do some mixing in C++, the compiler will complain, but these errors are irrelevent in python. So as many errors in C++ are far less in python. (but I agree that some will not be check)

At the end it is a matter of design and the quality of code. Bad python code will end on error, bad c++ might throw a buffer overflow.

the first problem for portage that he said is :

I think this is the real issue. Not C++ or Python or whatever.

I certainly hope so!

I've been with Gentoo pretty much from the beginning and it's the perfect distribution for me.
Nothing else comes even remotely close.

I just love being able to specify exactly which optional features of a package I need and especially which features I really don't (welcome to the power of USE flags).

Compile times should be of no matter on a fairly recent system and even if you need two days on older hardware it is worth it in my opinion.
OF COURSE it depends on the actual scenario and in what way exactly the computer will be used.

Not many other distributions can give me the freedom Gentoo does while still providing me with very easy to use tools to manage that freedom.
Gentoo can be as minimal or as bloated as you'd like it and I love it!

Edited 2007-12-16 06:25

but you're the guy who's running gentoo on a server, why should we trust you?

(the flaw in this argument lies in the possibility that kev009 is so leet that he keeps a gentoo server completely stable.)

(otherwise it is a pretty valid argument.)

Yes, Gentoo is an excellent server meta-distribution. In fact, only the BSDs come close with their ports system.

Most people don't know of the advanced package manager that is portage. I can compile the whole environment on a workstation, export the package dir over NFS, and install -- get this -- BINARY, yes -- BINARY packages on the server. These packages can be TESTED on the build environment as well. Holy shit!

FWIW Easynews.com is almost 100% Gentoo servers, as are a few other businesses. Most folks think or expect Gentoo to be or fit one mold but it really doesn't. It scales from the CF router in my closet to the servers in my rack.

You know, RPM can do everything Portage can do, but better and faster, and it also has really good binary support.

All the people who defend Portage like it's some sort of magical advanced package management system really don't have a lot of experience with actually doing advanced things.

And even so, dpkg/apt is lightyears ahead of any RPM based solution.

It's been a while since I've uses an rpm distro, but can rpm provide a variable dependancy tree that changes based on how you configure a package? For example, if I want to install a gtk package that has optional gnome integration, can I easily disable that integration and not pull in a whole bunch of gnome dependancies?

Keeping a gentoo system stable is a non-issue. Just RTFM and follow it.

It's also easy to break. Install all kinds of unstable software, and do emerge -uDN world on daily basis. That'll do the trick.

You don't have to be leet to make it stable. Just use common sense (that however may of course be leet in it self :p )

On my Debian desktop/workstation, I have the window manager I want, the browser I want, the e-mail client I want, the IM client I want, the music software, the office apps, and so on.

On my Ubuntu laptop, it all pretty much "just works".

On my OpenBSD server, I have OpenLDAP setup how I want, I have apache, postfix, mysql, etc...

So ... I have everything I want, setup how I want - and I didn't spend an entire day doing "stage 1 / stage 2 / stage 3" installs - and I don't spend hours and hours per week turning my CPU into a hot iron grill by way of compiling hundreds of megs of source code (thereby wasting enormous amounts of electricity and otherwise making the machine completely useless while it's compiling)

So ... what am I missing out on exactly?

You are not doing stage 1 and stage 2 installations anymore (which is sad - they are the funniest parts of installing gentoo).

More power to you that all packages in Ubuntu are compiled exactly the way you want them to be. Personally I must say that my needs are quite different, so none of the 'buntus fit me. I'd prefer LFS but it's a PITA to maintain, so I use gentoo (though Source Mage and FreeBSD were close competitors before I chose gentoo back in ... hmm.. distant past).

Since all packages in *buntu are compiled 100% according your taste you are not missing out on anything. Consider yourself lucky.

EDIT: The computer is not "useless" while compiling. You can do all kind of stuff while the machine is compiling the packages in the background. You know, these days OS'es support multitasking. Your knowledge of gentoo is severely outdated.

Edited 2007-12-16 21:56 UTC

How soon after all those 'apps that you want' add a feature that you wanted to their stable release will you be able to get and make use of it?

I agree 100 percent. But I would also argue that people usually don't have enough knowledge to make proper use of USE flags either.

I set up a production server on Gentoo. I regret that now. There are other things to do,and daily emerges to keep it up to date are a scary proposition. I always stayed in the office until everyone left, so if it failed, it could be fixed. When you don't do it daily, it gets even more scary. Now it's been running solidly without updates for over a year... But I don't think it's going to survive an update now. I think Gentoo on a server is a BAD idea.

I set up a production server on Gentoo. I regret that now. There are other things to do,and daily emerges to keep it up to date are a scary proposition.

Why would you be doing daily emerges?

I always stayed in the office until everyone left, so if it failed, it could be fixed.

I'm sorry, but anybody who has to stay behind at an office and can't fit what they want to do in a 9 - 5 day has something wrong with them. It doesn't take long to emerge anything, particularly server software.

When you don't do it daily, it gets even more scary

Why?

But I don't think it's going to survive an update now.

Are you doing an emerge world or something? Why in God's name are you doing that? If you're trying to update everything on a production server, no matter what distro you use, you're an idiot.

I think Gentoo on a server is a BAD idea.

This has nothing to do with Gentoo, and everything to do with you.

Thanks for all the ad hominem, segedunumm... I never meant to offend you or hurt you. Sorry for that, I only wanted to be helpful and give some input on my experience.

Someone in this thread suggested daily emerges (world) to stay up to date...

I stayed because this server can't be down when people need to work, it can't break because an emerge causes problems.

The longer you don't emerge, the more likely there are issues that can't be resolved automatically. This is a 'feature' that all rolling release distros seem to suffer from.

Servers need security updates, and I realize that it doesn't have to be an update world. Anyway, it's working, I won't touch it.

Thanks for all the ad hominem, segedunumm... I never meant to offend you or hurt you. Sorry for that, I only wanted to be helpful and give some input on my experience.

You're not offending me. I'm just curious why you're doing what you're doing, because if you do that with any distro and not just Gentoo then you're in for a rough time.

The longer you don't emerge, the more likely there are issues that can't be resolved automatically. This is a 'feature' that all rolling release distros seem to suffer from.

Well, the alternative is that you'll have to take the server down and install a completely updated and new version of a distro and you'll have to reproduce your install. Yes, rolling releases can present problems, but on a production server you should be leaving it as-is, and when you want to do a mass upgrade then practice on another non-essential server. Security upgrades shouldn't present a problem. Have a look at what any emerge will actually install before you do it.

I set up a production server on Gentoo. I regret that now. There are other things to do,and daily emerges to keep it up to date are a scary proposition. I always stayed in the office until everyone left, so if it failed, it could be fixed. When you don't do it daily, it gets even more scary. Now it's been running solidly without updates for over a year... But I don't think it's going to survive an update now. I think Gentoo on a server is a BAD idea.

I've got a server running Gentoo. It syncs the portage tree every week on Sunday via a script, updates any software I've deemed necessary to be updated and it also installs anything which glsa-check recommends to be installed. But it won't update unnecessary software, I've set it up to do the compiling in the middle of the night on the highest possible nice level.. And I just haven't installed anything unnecessary there like GUI software. And it's working like a dream. Haven't had to do anything manually for several months and haven't had any issues with it whatsoever

That's great. (I also only installed what was strictly needed.) I do remember having to etc-update after most updates.

My work place runs Gentoo on production servers too... and I myself runs a Gentoo machine for my daily analysis tasks. We have excellent runtime and we haven't run into a problem yet.

The point is, anyone that runs emerge -u world daily without checking is just asking for trouble. How many people would actually let Ubuntu, Debian, or RHWS auto-update to the next major release automatically on a production server? People would say that those people are idiots.

For me, I never emerge any big packages until it's released for 3 days after stable (let the early adopters install and found the issues for me). For kernels, aside from GLSA advisories, I only wait until -r3 before installing. For critical packages like glibc I wait at least a week before installing.

I always take a quick look before emerges. With the older hardware I run, a "emerge -u world" would probably kill my nvidia-driver for new every new update nvidia put out(for example, nvidia recently decided to change the 1.0.87xx versioning convention into the 87.xx conversion for no reason). So, Gentoo, like other distributions, requires a bit of care when updating.. just that the care is spread out over time rather than one big honking update.

Take a moment and buy a new server to test the updates and everything, this goes to every other distro as well.

Doing live update on production server is at your fault. I had CentOS with Xen doing dom0 and did a live update and it broke the hell out of it... Now I'll never do it again.