On Dec 3, 2011 3:06 AM, "Dale" <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > LinuxIsOne wrote: >> >> Why I asked to just know if Gentoo is better or openSUSE is better for a novice who want to learn Linux, just coming directly from Windows...that's why...However, I have liked the Ubuntu (since it is easy and nice) but don't know about all Linux in general....is Gentoo is also using the same Linux which Ubuntu is using? Cheers. > > > "Better" depends on what you expect. If you want to learn about Linux, Gentoo will teach you a lot. Heck, you will learn a lot by the time you get it installed and get to your first boot prompt. I get the impression that you don't realize how in depth Gentoo is. Gentoo can be installed by a Linux newcomer but it will not be a walk in the park. I used Mandrake for 6 months or so and it took me about 3 tries to get to a point where Gentoo would boot up. It took a while more to get everything working still. I had to redo my kernel several times. > > The point I am making is, it is not how different Gentoo is from other distros, it's whether it is something you need and want to put the time in to learn. Gentoo doesn't have a GUI installer and you do have to compile everything you install. I recently installed Kubuntu for my Brother. It is a walk in the park compared to installing Gentoo. Did I learn anything about Linux, not hardly. I don't think Kubuntu is made to teach a lot about Linux. It's just made to install easily and quickly without much fuss. > > I do hope you will try Gentoo tho. It is sort of addicting at times. lol >
Indeed! Especially control freaks like me :-) But seriously, I personally found Gentoo to be the most logical Linux distro. Yes, the initial barrier (installation) is daunting, so to speak, but after doing it successfully, one can immediately intuit "what's going on". Installing and configuring other packages becomes piece of cake. The logical way of Gentoo even extends to its packages. For instance, packages that are meant to be run as services/daemons will *certainly* have a pair of files in conf.d and init.d. Customizable environs are in env.d and profile.d. And so on. I've used Linux exclusively as servers, and I have dabbled with Red Hat, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch, but Gentoo wins hands down for its logicality. Not to mention that I can customize my servers exactly to my specifications, instead of having to put up with cruft that the distro maintainer feel as a "must have". Case in point : how many distros allow you to choose which cron daemon you want to use? Another plus point is the almost complete devel tools provided out of the box: the gcc suite. Now if I happen across an open source project that hasn't made it yet to the portage tree, I can just download and compile it myself. Related to that, is the great job Portage did regarding dependency hell. Since I am no longer hostage to the whims of the distro maintainer re: versions of libraries installed, if a program needs a library that's newer than the current 'stable' version, I can just keyword the needed version and compile away. Rgds,
