Linux: concerns over systemd [OT]

Wed Oct 22 00:24:19 UTC 2014

On 22/10/14 00:57, Israel G. Lugo wrote:
> 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.

I certainly remember this, and miss it. The Gentoo documentation, and
indeed the experience of compiling everything, was excellent. I still
miss some of the tools that Gentoo had in Debian/CentOS (and the stage3
live CD is still my goto 'system rescue tool' :))

But.. I don't use it any more for anything serious. It's too much
upkeep, and when the the included/maintained rc scripts for <some
package> do inevitably fail to catch a corner case -- far more likely if
you're using an overlay -- then you're left with little choice but to
start modifying/writing your own.

> 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.

I was mildly unfair in the way my response was worded, but I do hold
that the Gentoo way of doing things is much simpler than that of other
distributions. This was, in my experience, a double-edged sword. YMMV, etc.

-- 
Tom