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by adwf
4086 days ago
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It was no.3 that eventually killed Gentoo for me. Took a three week holiday and it must've been a busy release period or something, because when I came back I had an unholy hell of packages needing updating. The worst part was there were multiple dependencies that just wouldn't compile. I fixed the first couple, but when you have a 3hr+ OpenOffice compile fail on you inexplicably... I just want my computer to work without worrying about all that! It used to be that people would say "Then why are you using Linux? go back to Win/Mac", but nowadays a perfectly stable, maintainable and fast Linux is easily achievable. I think this is the major reason behind Gentoo's declining popularity recently. Having said that, I learnt a huge amount about Linux just by unbreaking all the bizarre things that risky Gentoo emerges did to my system :) Ultimately, it all comes down to how I'd rather spend my time. Hours and hours every month running a big emerge on Gentoo, or a few seconds in pacman on Arch? I have work to do on my computer and eventually the process of just running the Gentoo updates was occupying too much time that I could be spending on actual work. |
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Forget to update for a while? Good luck getting your system into a sane state ever again. Better yet, if you go a while without updating, you'll wind up with package conflicts in your dependency graph (the worst is the dreaded "package X and package Y both insist on different versions of the same dependency"), and it'll take you forever to manually untangle them.
I've been using Gentoo as my main since 2004 or 2005, though I had some Arch experience from my work desktop at my last job (I installed Arch on it because I wanted something Gentoo-like but wasn't about to risk Compile Hell when I had deadlines to pay attention to). The decision to switch wasn't an easy one, but it's been very rewarding. I'm still of the opinion that portage is the best package management system I've used (it's not just for compiling stuff from source: there's no reason someone can't build a binary distro using portage), but pacman is a pretty damn close second, and I'll take pacman's lack of flexibility over Compile Hell any day.
I still have conflicting thoughts about systemd. I actually ripped it out on my old work computer and replaced it with OpenRC (to fulfil my goal of "something Gentoo-like but without all the compiling"), but on this machine I decided I'd keep systemd around for at least a few weeks because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new. Now, I'm not sure what to do. I've discovered there's a bunch of stuff to really like about systemd (in particular, "systemctl status" is amazing), but on the other hand, I really miss OpenRC, and I happen to prefer its idioms over systemd's (I'm sorry, but you will never convince me that INI-style syntax isn't the ugliest thing ever).