I got an old Pentium III computer from my friend, who's moving back to his country. After a lot of soul searching, I decided to try Gentoo Linux to to setup a file server for home network.
Man, what a piece of crap this Gentoo is! It downloads all sources from Internet, and compiles them at your computer. The idea is that it can build the most optimal configuration for you. There's an installation manual of tens of pages. You have to manually follow all steps. It's easy to miss a step, certainly. I tried to do every step as accurately as possible, given that it took me many many hours. I started with Knoppix CD to boot.
After all this trouble, when I boot a computer the HDD wasn't mounted. Ok, I logged on. I don't recommend this thing even to hobbyist. Maybe for graduate students only, to learn concepts of this sort of Linux.
Yesterday, I installed Fedora Core 3 on the same machine. Boy, what a difference! It was also slow, suprisingly. I remember the RedHat 8 was quite fast. Still, FC3 didn't require endless re-boots like Windows or manual process like Gentoo.
I chose GNOME over KDE, and it was a mistake. GNOME didn't render screens properly, they were not refreshed at all. So, I dumped GNOME, and installed KDE. Now, Firefox didn't have Java plugin. It's strange because Java 1.5 was installed. Not a big deal, I configured it manually and it works fine. This a mature product unlike Gentoo.
3 comments:
Installing gentoo isnt difficult if you can read. it certainly is a little more involved than a 'newbie' distro to install, but the end result is well worth it. and for the record, downloading 'everything as source and compiling it' isnt your only option, but its one of the great features of gentoo. plenty of precompiled stuff, particularly for installation, is available if you take a moment to look.
Why dont you go one step ahead and say windows is better?? Now, installation is not the only thing that decides how a distro is? Do u really know what portage is??
Look, Gentoo takes longer to install but u have to know that OS is just not any other program which u install for one day... U use it for atleast a month, so spending a day or two is worth it, for the sppeed increase u observe.
Windows was definitely better when it comes to installation.
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