I agree that nearly all package managers for linux distributions suck. It's true that quite a lot of time is needed to understand portage. However, portage is far more sophisticated than a lot of other package management systems used by linux distributions. Still there is a lot which could be simplified in gentoo and of course portage isn't minimal/suck-less software. Nevertheless portage makes a lot of things easier (especially for a source-based distribution) and after all I have learned a lot (non-gentoo related stuff) by using gentoo -- it's not just about running emerge and watching stuff getting compiled.
For now and the near future, gentoo will stay my linux distribution of choice (as it was in the past few years). -- Džen On 14/02/2011 02:32, Andrei wrote:
The problem with gentoo and pretty much every other Linux distro is the package manager. People need/want to install software, rather than -zomg-optimize it. I used to work in an environment where Gentoo was praised, myself being a Gentoo user at the time. Now I realize how much time I've spent learning how to use a particular package manager, rather than Linux itself. IMHO it's all about the package managers, the simpler and the less clutter it installs, the better. What I like about gentoo is the idea of a minimal base system and this aspect has been imported into other distributions (see Arch's& CRUX's core repositories). -- Andrei
