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I agree with you on Gentoo. I loved the project from the rolling distribution standpoint and had run it for a while but long-term maintenance of it was a mess.

by mdip 11y ago

I agree with you on Gentoo. I loved the project from the rolling distribution standpoint and had run it for a while but long-term maintenance of it was a mess. I'd reserve a few hours for doing updates since every emerge would have me validating via diffs every configuration file (which it, unintelligently, wanted to return to the "sample" state). Tumbleweed struck the right balance for me. Bleeding edge, rolling distribution with a mix of easy maintenance and configuration (and at the time all of Gentoo's emerge operations involved compiling from source, so you could add "faster maintenance" to the list). I have a side-project I'm going to start this weekend that'll have me checking out Gentoo again, is it still this ugly or has that part improved?

LoneWolf 11y ago
Being a Gentoo user for years, if your issue is the config file updates I would say they are nearly if not the same, AFAIK there are some better tools other than etc-update that may make it easier. The whole compiling from source well you can avoid some that with binary packages but that is not the focus of the distro, it has always been compiling from source. About the updates I currently run it on a server and plan on moving my laptop from windows to Gentoo, at least on the server there are no issues, I have a cron to run sync everyday and send me an email report, when where are too much new packages I update it, usually pretty quick, unless there are new versions for gcc or other large packages (gcc takes 15min). I would say give it a try again.
- mdip 11y ago
  Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need where this is the only solution that suits it well so I'm glad they haven't abandoned that (I seem to recall that about the time I left Gentoo, they had just introduced binary sources for the kernel and such to speed up getting a system working "from nothing"). I'll poke around for information on alternatives to etc-update. That really was a bear and where I'm planning on using this I'll want to have that work with a lot less overhead.

by mdip 11y ago

LoneWolf 11y ago

Being a Gentoo user for years, if your issue is the config file updates I would say they are nearly if not the same, AFAIK there are some better tools other than etc-update that may make it easier. The whole compiling from source well you can avoid some that with binary packages but that is not the focus of the distro, it has always been compiling from source. About the updates I currently run it on a server and plan on moving my laptop from windows to Gentoo, at least on the server there are no issues, I have a cron to run sync everyday and send me an email report, when where are too much new packages I update it, usually pretty quick, unless there are new versions for gcc or other large packages (gcc takes 15min). I would say give it a try again.

mdip 11y ago
Many thanks for the info -- actually, the reason I'm looking into Gentoo, again, is specifically because of the "compile from source". I have a particular need where this is the only solution that suits it well so I'm glad they haven't abandoned that (I seem to recall that about the time I left Gentoo, they had just introduced binary sources for the kernel and such to speed up getting a system working "from nothing"). I'll poke around for information on alternatives to etc-update. That really was a bear and where I'm planning on using this I'll want to have that work with a lot less overhead.