Alan McKinnon wrote:
to build other distros. It is not suitable for newbies (disregard the
occasional newbie that does get it right, that's a minority and very
atypical), and one really does have to have moved beyond the "Oh, look!
Shiny installer!" mentality to appreciate it. When you get to that
stage, you appreciate that you need a bootstrap system to build the
first stages of your own distro, and you can get that bootstrap system
from any place you feel like getting it from.
I came to Gentoo at gentoo 1.2 / gentoo 1.4 (I don't remember the year
but it was around 2002). I was a GNU/Linux newbie who only knew RedHat
and didn't quite understand compiling kernels. Doing the install taught
me GNU/Linux and I'm better for it. I think newbies should try it, but
unfortunately a lot might be turned off because it's 'too much work'.
Anybody that feels they *need* or *must have* an official Gentoo
installer is probably the wrong target market and should be referred to
other distros that will suit their needs better. This is not a troll or
an elitist statement, it's just recognizing what gentoo is and what it
isn't - it's not a distro suitable for someone to whom chroot isn't yet
second nature.
I don't think it's an elitist statement, I agree in thinking that we
shouldn't cater to the lcd. There are plenty of distros out there that
work just fine and the greatest thing about FOSS is choice. If all of
the options are the same there's no point. Again though, I have to
disagree with the point that it's not for somebody whom chroot isn't yet
second nature: I learned chroot through the install. I've tried playing
around with Fedora / Ubunttu but I keep going back to Gentoo; it's my
favorite distro.
just my $0.02
eric
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