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"...you'd have to be retarded, or hate yourself, to choose Gentoo for a server..." "I don't know of any hosting providers that offer Gentoo, actually, and if I

by qhoxie 18y ago

"...you'd have to be retarded, or hate yourself, to choose Gentoo for a server..." "I don't know of any hosting providers that offer Gentoo, actually, and if I saw one that did, I'd pretty much write them off as amateurs." Hmm... Linode and Slicehost are fairly well-known around here, not to mention those amateurish retards over at EngineYard. Seems a bit extreme.

SwellJoe 18y ago
OK, I should have said, "that support Gentoo". Linode and Slice, both of whom I've talked to and know are extremely savvy people, let you pick your own poison...but they don't support what's inside the "slice" or "node". EngineYard, I'm unfamiliar with. Maybe they just really know what they're doing. It's possible to make Windows run reliably on servers, if you really know what you're doing...that don't make it a good idea. But, it changes nothing. Gentoo is, for most users, a horror show on servers. Probably less than 1% of our users use Gentoo, and about 50% of the batshit crazy problems (the ones of the "my Apache won't start and says there's a link error with blah blah blah, and when I try to run a PHP script it kills one of my goldfish...why does your software keep breaking my server?" variety...our software always get the blame, of course, since ours is the UI they see) happen on Gentoo. I'm just trying to help, and trying to be emphatic that Gentoo on a server is begging to suffer. If you don't really know what you're doing (and often, even if you do), it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot (or your whole leg, or nuke Idaho), it just doesn't make sense to run it on a production server. I figure I have a lot more data than most people here, since we make systems management software for web servers, and we have millions of people worldwide using it. I don't intend to piss off the raving Gentoo fans, of which I know there are many, I'm just pointing out that Gentoo is a dramatically more complex system than any other distro, because of basic design decisions...and the amount of testing that any one Gentoo configuration ever gets is miniscule--practically nil--because there are so many possible combinations of "Gentoo system". If you enjoy Gentoo, that's fine. But, I know what happens when Linux newbies are set loose on a Gentoo system: disaster. And it happens fast, and in dramatic ways that leave them wondering what happened, and why they didn't keep better backups. I'll also point out that we support Gentoo with our products (what does that say about us? nothing good, except that we listen to what our users ask for). We try to accommodate them and help them, but the marketing for Gentoo has been so effective, and the quality control so ineffective, that it leads a whole lot of newbies down really painful learning paths. And the culture around Gentoo is one of "embrace the learning experience"...no matter how painful it is.
- qhoxie 18y ago
  That's a fair way of putting it for the most part. Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish. I don't think it is any secret that Gentoo is not meant for the inexperienced. On that same point, it is clear that by its design most Gentoo configurations are not officially tested. From this, it becomes clearer how to properly manage Gentoo servers: the same way any diligent admin would - stage, test, stabilize, deploy. That is the beauty of Gentoo as a meta-distribution. It is far from point-and-click and I hope it stays that way.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish. You're right. I'm not entirely politic sometimes. At least folks won't think I'm ambivalent about the issue. And, I pretty much do only intend my comments for the kind of folks who are asking strangers for help in their selection--obviously, people who've been using Linux for 10 years, or whatever, can use anything that suits them, and they'll be able to make it work really well. They also need a lot less help (so popularity doesn't matter), and have far better grasp of how things actually work (so they can see through the differences between distros and not having a standard initscript or rc script for some app doesn't matter because you can write it yourself).
    - qhoxie 18y ago
      I respect the candidness and thorough responses.

by qhoxie 18y ago

SwellJoe 18y ago

OK, I should have said, "that support Gentoo". Linode and Slice, both of whom I've talked to and know are extremely savvy people, let you pick your own poison...but they don't support what's inside the "slice" or "node". EngineYard, I'm unfamiliar with. Maybe they just really know what they're doing. It's possible to make Windows run reliably on servers, if you really know what you're doing...that don't make it a good idea. But, it changes nothing. Gentoo is, for most users, a horror show on servers. Probably less than 1% of our users use Gentoo, and about 50% of the batshit crazy problems (the ones of the "my Apache won't start and says there's a link error with blah blah blah, and when I try to run a PHP script it kills one of my goldfish...why does your software keep breaking my server?" variety...our software always get the blame, of course, since ours is the UI they see) happen on Gentoo. I'm just trying to help, and trying to be emphatic that Gentoo on a server is begging to suffer. If you don't really know what you're doing (and often, even if you do), it is so easy to shoot yourself in the foot (or your whole leg, or nuke Idaho), it just doesn't make sense to run it on a production server. I figure I have a lot more data than most people here, since we make systems management software for web servers, and we have millions of people worldwide using it. I don't intend to piss off the raving Gentoo fans, of which I know there are many, I'm just pointing out that Gentoo is a dramatically more complex system than any other distro, because of basic design decisions...and the amount of testing that any one Gentoo configuration ever gets is miniscule--practically nil--because there are so many possible combinations of "Gentoo system". If you enjoy Gentoo, that's fine. But, I know what happens when Linux newbies are set loose on a Gentoo system: disaster. And it happens fast, and in dramatic ways that leave them wondering what happened, and why they didn't keep better backups. I'll also point out that we support Gentoo with our products (what does that say about us? nothing good, except that we listen to what our users ask for). We try to accommodate them and help them, but the marketing for Gentoo has been so effective, and the quality control so ineffective, that it leads a whole lot of newbies down really painful learning paths. And the culture around Gentoo is one of "embrace the learning experience"...no matter how painful it is.

qhoxie 18y ago
That's a fair way of putting it for the most part. Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish. I don't think it is any secret that Gentoo is not meant for the inexperienced. On that same point, it is clear that by its design most Gentoo configurations are not officially tested. From this, it becomes clearer how to properly manage Gentoo servers: the same way any diligent admin would - stage, test, stabilize, deploy. That is the beauty of Gentoo as a meta-distribution. It is far from point-and-click and I hope it stays that way.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  Much better than saying hosts with it are retards or amateurish. You're right. I'm not entirely politic sometimes. At least folks won't think I'm ambivalent about the issue. And, I pretty much do only intend my comments for the kind of folks who are asking strangers for help in their selection--obviously, people who've been using Linux for 10 years, or whatever, can use anything that suits them, and they'll be able to make it work really well. They also need a lot less help (so popularity doesn't matter), and have far better grasp of how things actually work (so they can see through the differences between distros and not having a standard initscript or rc script for some app doesn't matter because you can write it yourself).
  - qhoxie 18y ago
    I respect the candidness and thorough responses.