On Thursday 04 January 2007 19:19, Luke-Jr wrote:
I have to recommend Gentoo for anyone who doesn't mind learning internal workings. Binary OS have too many problems with application availability...
I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva. Better yet, the binary packages work when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because some required file won't build or isn't the right version.
True to it's "ricer" car image, Gentoo requires constant tweaking and fiddling, and will regularly break down on you. The only reason you learn about the process of compiling and building software is because the process breaks so often on Gentoo, and you can either go in and fix it or learn enough about what's wrong to patch it - usually a dumb error in a build file - yourself.
Nobody should kid themselves that using emerge is anything like building LFS, compiling and installing from a tarball, or the best practice, building your own binary .deb or .rpm files. Those tasks will teach you useful things about your system. Gentoo will just teach you to hate it because it's always broken.