On 26/01/2014 20:41, hasufell wrote: > My pessimism comes from the fact that I wasn't able to communicate to > any1 in real life that gentoo and especially portage have a positive > usability score. Especially to those who have tried it once. As > someone who knows the internals and doesn't read portage messages > about conflicts anymore, but digs into the ebuilds directly... I don't > have a lot of severe problems to maintain any gentoo system. But it is > sad that you need those skills. > > Usually I tell people to use a desktop profile, never to use > autounmask, not to mix stable and unstable branch and not to play too > much with per-package useflags unless you are really missing something. > > Portage does alienate new users a lot. These performance issues add to > that.
I agree with some points and not so much on others. Gentoo has always targeted itself at a select bunch of users - those with large amounts of clue who have tried and failed to get binary distros to do what they want but can't see a good reason to do the LFS thing. This is a VERY specific market and people who truly need Gentoo already know what it will take to drive it. Thank $DEITY the ricer crowd that were infesting the place 2004-ish have long since moved on and taken their confirmation bias with them. Those who want a shiny Linux that works out the box and can be admined even on hangover days have Ubuntu and RHEL. So when people you talk to about Gentoo then reject it, don't take it personal, they are not usually rejecting the distro. What they are *really* saying more often than not is that Gentoo solves a problem they do not have, and they don't feel like investigating a complex solution they have no use for. That's been my experience in this area. People who need Gentoo and understand what it takes to build from source usually find the idea of portage very attractive indeed. They might have issue with the implementation of portage, but folks will put up with a lot of quirks to get what Gentoo is actually selling. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
