Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]

Tue Oct 21 23:57:17 UTC 2014

On 10/21/2014 11:59 PM, Tom Hill wrote:
> On 21/10/14 23:55, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> Ok, but how does it handle providing initscripts?  I gather any upstreams
>> which used to provide them aren't anymore...
> It's Gentoo: "You should write your own" is the most likely answer.

Actually, not at all; although I realize that's a very common misconception.

Gentoo Linux is, unfortunately, often associated with the whole "gcc
-O9000 -msuperfast -fwtf" wow-look-at-me crowd.

It's true that some people who use Gentoo go on and rave about how many
nanoseconds they were able to shave off of their boot time, or how many
obscure undocumented GCC options they managed to squeeze in without a
compile error. I suppose the flexible nature of Gentoo is appealing to
those who like to "look cool" and show off how they can watch the
compiler do its thing. However, that's not at all what the distribution
is about.

Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's got a steepish learning
curve, yes, but the documentation is very good; sadly, much of it was
lost a few years ago, due to a bad mishap on the community Gentoo Wiki
server, apparently without any backups. Back in the day, if I wanted to
learn about Samba, I'd Google "howto linux samba" and Gentoo's Wiki
would usually be among the first 3 hits. Their devs take stability very
seriously; it's a rolling distro, but there is still a reasonable
stabilization period for each package as new versions come out, during
which any open bugs may hold up the package until they're fixed.

It's all about choice. In my view, Gentoo is no better or worse than
Debian, Red Hat, or Ubuntu. Different species, they all make for a
better ecosystem.