To Gentoo or not to Gentoo

Ever since I installed Gentoo back in 2005 I’ve been hooked. Of course I’ve tried various other distributions, Ubuntu and many of it’s variants (I’m writing from Lubuntu currently) Fedora (I don’t think I’ve eve let it stay on a system for very long) and many many years ago before Gentoo I’ve had Mandrake, Red Hat, Slackware, Suse (open) and a few others.

There seems to exist a cycle of installing Gentoo, having it around for awhile, something breaks and I feel like I don’t have the time so I’ll try out the latest Ubuntu…a few weeks later I’ll reinstall Gentoo.

Now let me clarify on point, I’m referring to Gentoo as a desktop. I have 2 servers which have always had Gentoo installed on them and probably always will.

I realized that my main problem with Gentoo is usually graphics related in someway. Either my graphics break and I need to do a bunch of troubleshooting, finally getting something working or it has to do with endless configuration.

I think the documentation on the Gentoo-wiki has gone downhill for sometime. There just doesn’t seem to be enough manpower to update items. I’ve tried in vain to get NetworkManager integrated into the system so that it can connect before I login but alas, it never works. I would love to contribute more to Gentoo, help with documentation and such but I’m not quite done with school yet and my willpower to write wiki documents usually doesn’t last very long.

I’ve also realized half the fun of a Gentoo system is that installation procedure for me, I love reinstalling from scratch and having a squeaky clean system. If anyone is reading this you’ve probably realized that I’m beyond mortal help as most people loath installing Gentoo.

Currently my main desktop still has Gentoo on it but I’ve installed Lubuntu on my netbook. I was just tired of fucking with freedesktop.org to view my own partitions or trying to get Network Manager working in fluxbox (and saving the configuration files, automatically connecting and such) or having LibreOffice and Skype randomly crash for no reason.

I might put Gentoo back on my netbook someday but for now Lubuntu is fine. I had first tried Xubuntu but after updating the system, turning off some unneeded boot services, the boot time was 1 minute and 20 seconds. Lubuntu boots in about 50 seconds (my netbook has a harddrive not a SSD) so it is something of a booting dog.

One last complaint about Gentoo is the speed of portage. When I first booted my working Gentoo box a few months ago, I asked it to emerge -pv something, within 1 second i had my detailed results. After installing a bunch of packages and adding packages.mask, unmask,use my performance was now more like a minute later I’d get my results. I understand that I’ve added many more dependencies for the system to check but a fucking minute? It reminds me of going back to 2005 when searching the portage tree with -s was rediculous and everyone installed some sort of program that would cache all of the data to allow for quick searching (yes the devs have fixed this sometime back in 2007 or 2008 I think)

Alright enough ranting. Arch Linux. I have yet to try it but I’m intrigued by reading through the installation document. It could be a very interesting distribution, and I’ll probably try it out sometime after this weekend.

Who knows the future? I very well could end up becoming involved in Gentoo a lot more, fixing problems and documenting on the wiki. I’m almost done with my double degree, I’ve put my 2 weeks in a my job and in just 7 weeks I’ll be going over to Germany for a month to work on my Deutsch. When I get back I’ll be a graduate without a job (by choice).

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