{"id":5,"date":"2006-08-07T14:31:10","date_gmt":"2006-08-07T06:59:20","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2017-03-07T16:21:43","modified_gmt":"2017-03-07T16:21:43","slug":"just_how_difficult_is_gentoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/2006\/08\/07\/just_how_difficult_is_gentoo\/","title":{"rendered":"Just how &#8220;difficult&#8221; is Gentoo?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll try to make it short this time and share some experience I&#8217;ve had with the &#8216;new user&#8217; side.<\/p>\n<h1>Installation<\/h1>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ve had absolute Linux newbies successfully install Gentoo as their first Linux ever, with *very* little input from my side. (I guess I should just praise the efforts of the documentation team at this stage: You&#8217;ve done a nice job!)<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve also had more experienced users fail on the installation, even multiple times.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Conclusion<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The Gentoo Handbook will reliably get you up and running if you follow it <em>closely<\/em>. It&#8217;s easy to stray off, though, simply by skipping a line. You&#8217;re also very much in the dark if &#8216;something bad&#8217; happens (grub won&#8217;t install, for example) or you&#8217;re on non-mainstream hardware. I think the first part can be helped, the second part only to little degree, of course.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Suggestion<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Maybe a bit of simple formatting could already help, meaning whitespace. If you install Gentoo, chances are that you&#8217;re using <em>links<\/em> to view the documentation, and it&#8217;s very easy to get lost there. Really, this is not a joke. I&#8217;ve seen it multiple times: People follow the doc, skip a line and end up in a mess.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Maybe some more background info (even better maybe to have a background document\/wiki to link to, although that only works for online users) could make things clearer, too. Meaning if I don&#8217;t know about grub I can get some hints or read what others have written in the gentoo-wiki, for example. That might also help the &#8216;in the dark&#8217; part a bit. If anybody from docs is interested I&#8217;d be willing to contribute.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>Maintenance<\/h1>\n<p>\nI run Gentoo on multiple servers and workstations. It is by far the best manageable Linux on the planet. Here&#8217;s the pros &amp; cons:\n<\/p>\n<h2>Pros<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>I call Gentoo a &#8216;streaming distro&#8217;, since there are no releases (okok, there *are* releases, but you know what I mean .-), resulting in Gentoo being the only distribution that completely misses to make me explode in anger because I need to go through an &#8216;upgrade&#8217;. I have had dangerously high blood pressure with any other distro, SuSE being notoriously ugly in wrecking systems (back in the &lt; v.7 times, at least). Even Ubuntu failed to upgrade from 5 to 6 in a really smooth manner (it worked, but there were quite some quirks left that were difficult to figure out). I can even upgrade the toolchain without fearing for my life. So far Gentoo has prolonged my life quite some, since blood pressure that thigh sure ain&#8217;t healthy.\n<\/li>\n<li>Portage is just great. It figures out dependencies and (almost always) does &#8216;The Right Thing (TM)&#8217;. Probably I&#8217;m just too stupid to use rpm, but I&#8217;ve had the hell of a time with that thing. Need some extra feature? USE it, build it, done. Great, great, great. I don&#8217;t even have to figure out obscure packet names of dependencies .-)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Cons<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>You really need to keep updated. There&#8217;s no real path of *not* updating. No security backports, for example. That is a little dangerous on the servers. If you don&#8217;t keep up, you may easily be buried under a lot of changes; especially since you need to keep updated on those changes, too (mailing lists\/announces etc.). Chances are, you don&#8217;t have all the information at hand if you wait too long before updating. It gets problematic on stuff you might not want to update, say PHP. When PHP6 comes it, it will break a lot of apps, presumably. Now, we still have 4.x in the tree (and 5.x didn&#8217;t break as many apps as 6 will do, IMHO), but for how long?<\/li>\n<li>That also means Gentoo is still high maintenance. I have little problem with that, but I think some may have. I use to update all boxes frequently (at least once a week), so it&#8217;s basically continuous work, but short periods only. Nevertheless, you need to have some time to put aside for maintenance.<\/li>\n<li>Things break. This comes in waves. All can be fine for months, and then you have a week where everything breaks. I have no clue how this happens, but it happens. The bad thing is that with all the configurability you can&#8217;t test <em>everything<\/em> (unless you have completely redundant servers). I have some &#8216;single&#8217; machines that are backed up by standby hardware and backups, though, that don&#8217;t have a test environment assigned. An update that merges fine on 4 test and 4 productive machines may still break on the next box due to a different USE flag, for example.<\/li>\n<li>Design changes. Those really hurt. Like Apache. Reminds me of the SuSE times again (every release did everything completely different; it was so unbelievably bad to have to look for all the stuff in different places every time &#8230;). Sure, if you make a bad design choice, you&#8217;ll have to fix it at some time. It&#8217;s probably better for everybody&#8217;s sanity than keeping wrong stuff around for ages (see Windows .-). But it hurts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Suggestion<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Most if not all b0rkage can be avoided by using portage logging or ELOG. I have wanted this from the beginning, and now it&#8217;s been around for some time, it&#8217;s great, and everybody should use it. Though <strong>none<\/strong> of the new Gentoo users around here knew about it. That&#8217;s bad. It needs to go somewhere in <strong>bold<\/strong> and <strong>big<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>Given the number of times you need to revdep-rebuild something, &#8216;gentoolkit&#8217; should IMHO be in the default profiles.<\/li>\n<li>Users need to be informed of changes, so something like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gentoo.org\/proj\/en\/glep\/glep-0042.html\">GLEP 42<\/a> would be more than helpful.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h1>Verdict<\/h1>\n<p>\nGentoo is not a &#8216;dumb user&#8217; distro, and I guess we all know that, and I guess we&#8217;re not really aiming for that, either. Nevertheless, we still fall a small step short of what we can do for the &#8216;educated user&#8217;, what is what I&#8217;d call the Gentoo target. If we can push it a little more, we&#8217;re on solid ground. I think it&#8217;s amazing how mature this project has become already.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nNevertheless, I&#8217;d like to remind everybody that we should not ignore users with low level of expertise. Our forums are known as one of the top resources to get Linux help. Our users are known to be helpful, our devs are know to be skillful. There is no need to ignore the lower end, and, seeing that the 2006 releases contain a graphical installer (didn&#8217;t try it, though), it seems we aren&#8217;t, either.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nSo, in my opinion, we should do whatever is possible to help new users (and gain new users, in that regard). I&#8217;m about to discuss some ideas with the re-formed PR project and we&#8217;ll see how that goes. My two cents are simply: Don&#8217;t redline somebody when in doubt, only when you&#8217;re sure you have very good reasons .-)\n<\/p>\n<p>-frilled (hmm, was that &#8216;short&#8217;?)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll try to make it short this time and share some experience I&#8217;ve had with the &#8216;new user&#8217; side. Installation I&#8217;ve had absolute Linux newbies successfully install Gentoo as their first Linux ever, with *very* little input from my side. (I guess I should just praise the efforts of the documentation team at this stage: &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/2006\/08\/07\/just_how_difficult_is_gentoo\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Just how &#8220;difficult&#8221; is Gentoo?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.gentoo.org\/frilled\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}