I'm going to take a lot of liberties both with humorous informality (hopefully you'll agree with that name for it) and argument; please accept it as a cheerfully submitted 'other side of the argument'.
On Thu, 8 Nov 2007 00:32:58 +0000 (UTC) James <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Daniel Iliev <daniel.iliev <at> gmail.com> writes: > > > I´m waiting for too. > > > Why? > > ... > Well, I think that fixing that abortion of an installation CD > is of paramount concern. Like it or not, the first thing prospective > new users see, is the installation process. In my opinion, it > is of quintessential importance for Gentoo to have a normal, > functional, easy installation CD. gentoo is unlike ubuntu (for example) in that if you're using portage, you're probably going to have to be comfortable at the command line. That's why i've always been skeptical of the graphical install process. It's not a very user-friendly distro to run, either. It's a very command-line-centric distro, and not particularly well suited to people who just want to 'install linux and get on with using their computers' -- although, i think it would be a great foundation for that kind of an install. A stage 4, as it were, that was more officially supported by the distro. After all, can we really expect installation from source to go flawlessly for all those packages , for all those users accross the web? from that point of view, gentoo doesn't have a 'distribution' install cd at all, but rather a script to automate the manual install process. and I think an "official Stage 4" going to satisfy your concerns and preserve the gentoo philosophy the best. Anyhow... > I've been using Gentoo since 2004. I know graduate students in > Computer Science that use Ubuntu in lieu of Gentoo, solely based on > the nightmare that installing Gentoo via a normal graphical install > CD is.... Yeah, but if they would have used the minimal cd like graduate students in Computer Science should, they probably would have been fine ; ) If you ask me, the graphical cds gave us more bad press than the lack thereof. > If you do not like my opinion, you should look at what Daniel Robbins > had to say, as I ran across a posting of his today, about this very > issue. (but no link, how can I?) > An awesome collection of techies does not gravitate users > to join the ranks of distro users. A (easy) graphical installation > method is a requirement. Gentoo get's tons of bad reviews, > based on the installation process. True, too true. There is altogether too little press concerning the manual install process, cherished (apparently) by everyone who actually uses gentoo and doesn't just install it. And far too little coverage of the parts of gentoo that rock -- that's the thing about reviewers: they are doing workstation installs and they don't generally do much package management before writing up the review and moving on to the next distro. There _are_ good things about gentoo, unique things that no other distributions offer -- I think the active members the list and the forums agree to that. But these things aren't the automatic install process ( I consider the manual install process one of them, if you haven't noticed). > Yes I've installed dozens of gentoo system, and the resulting > product is wonderful, much akin to a girl with a great personality. > However, she ain't every going to get 'laid' (become popular) > because the (installation) process is *UGLY*. If you think the command line is ugly. If you ask me, it's ncurses that's ugly. Command line doesn't look great, but it works pretty slick. all those unix people were really thinking... > Let us first be honest about this, so it can be fixed. At that > point ( a normal installation CD), Gentoo can take it's > rightful place as a major distro.... I agree that this is very important to the popularity of gentoo... but _not_ to its usability post-install. That's why I think the balance must be walked delicately, because with if there is too much emphesis on what is basically marketing, I worry along with the others that the quality of the product will suffer. That's why it seems that an official stage4 would be a good compromise. It should be pretty easy to make it into a bootable cd or usb stick, or you could just un-tar it and run grub in a script file, after setting up a few values (hostname, etc). But you still get portage and the slickness of gentoo, right off the bat. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
