The Ups and Downs of Gentoo

For over a month now I’ve been using Gentoo as my primary operating system. It’s been a real treat to get to install it (twice, actually) and learn the ropes by getting my hands dirty. Overall I think it’s my favorite OS because of the transparent way it does packages and the super-ease of upgrading everything. Despite that, I plan to switch to Suse 9.3 soon. Let me explain why.

First, the stuff about Gentoo that excells:

• Gentoo lets you compile everything.
  From the kernel to every single program you run you get to compile it on your own machine. While this doesn’t necessarily offer extra speed, it can dramatically increase system performance if you understand how to use your USE=”" variable in /etc/make.conf. You can set flags that offer your program Gnome supportbut not KDE (USE=”gtk2 -kde -qt”), or the otherway around (USE=”-gtk2 kde qt”). This’ll keep your programs optimized.
  And because compiling everything can be a hassle if you don’t want to wait forever, Portage (the Gentoo package system) also lets you use pre-compiled packages when available through the –usepkg flag. Some things probably aren’t worth the wait to compile them yourself.
• Gentoo lets you upgrade in place
  I remember reading a few years ago that a certain user hated that RedHat didn’t let you upgrade without losing everything. Even Windows gives you the option to not reformat if you want. Lucky for us Gentoo has improved the Linux experience so much that it takes only a second and a single file copy to fully upgrade your system.
  Gentoo uses profiles as release numbers. They are very simply named: 2004.2, 2004.3, and the most current one is 2005.0. To update all the programs on your machine you simply type # emerge --update world and when there is a new profile that you can switch to Portage will tell you to edit your profile to reflect the newly downloaded version of Gentoo that’s available as a folder in /usr/portage/profiles/. To upgrade to the new profile just point the symlink /etc/make.profile to the new folder.
• Huge package warehouse
  The Gentoo package system is full of goodies. There’s everything from the basics of apacha, kde, gnome, php, etc., to obscure stuff like the games ‘Wakkabox’ (?) and even commercial software like VMWare and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for Linux. For commercial stuff your original CD or serial key are required, but Portage will install the program for you. I’ve only twice found a program that I wanted to install which was not already in the Portage tree. For these situations, rpm and make work as well as they do on any other system.

That’s the really good stuff about Gentoo. It has some problems though. Not big ones, but problems that are real enough for me to be switching to Suse 9.3.

• You have to configure everything
  This is usually a plus, but at times it’s really a horrible idea. I’ve been struggling with my Intel ProWireless 2200BG for the entire time I’ve used Gentoo. I’ve followed every tutorial and manual online and I can’t get the thing working. It’s supposed to be hard but possible, this is just frustrating. There are other things I’d like to try that may not be possible for me until I get a distro that supports it a little better (Like the Xen Hypervisor). The ipw2200 (my wireless card) package worked with some bugs on Suse 9.2 - I figure by 9.3 they’ll have an updated version that runs smoothly.
• Speed
  Sometimes it’s just nice to have a system that you know you can install in an afternoon. If something goes wrong you can just make sure you have a backup of key files, wipe the drive clean, and start over in time for dinner. With Gentoo, there’s been at least two nights where I gave it a long list of files to install and I went to sleep - only to find it still at work by breakfast time.

It should be noted that this is not a real criticism of Gentoo. If your hardware (especially networking) is supported natively by the Linux kernel you may never find any need to switch out of Gentoo. In fact, as soon as ipw2200 support becomes reliable enough that I can compile it as a module in my kernel I’ll be switching back to write more. Until then, y’all might be hearing lots about Suse.