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There two reasons I have up on Gentoo several years. One was a period of very high drama amongst the developers. The major one was packages never being marked

There two reasons I have up on Gentoo several years. One was a period of very high drama amongst the developers. The major one was packages never being marked as stable. There was a file you could add packages to in order to allow unstable versions, but it just kept getting longer and longer. If I wanted long term stability, I'd use Debian. For desktops and workstations, I expect things to be "fresh" where each distro has their own tastes for fresh, but certainly measured in months. (I switched to Ubuntu because I knew I'd get fresh Gnome, at a time when there were good system enhancements like NetworkManager.) A quick check on http://packages.gentoo.org http://packages.gentoo.org shows that no version of Gnome 3 appears to be marked stable. For the software package I am an author of, the most recent version marked stable was released 13 months ago and there have been 10 releases since! LibreOffice does seem to be an up to date version, as does emacs. One area when Gentoo shines are the docs - they are very very good. I did try Arch a while back and ended up in a maze of using the wrong one out of official and unofficial documentation.

od2m 13y ago
I don't want to identify myself but I was one of the first developers for Gentoo back when it was called Enoch. There was always drama, credit stealing, back-stabbing et all. Arguably the largest contribution I made to the distribution (once again not mentioning specifics to identify myself)... the history of the event was rewritten and I was left out of it entirely. I got the heck out of there. That being said, the founder Daniel Robbins is a nice guy and taught me a lot.
- bofussing 13y ago
  Daniel Robbins also left, he has since set up a Gentoo meta-distribution called Funtoo http://www.funtoo.org/ http://www.funtoo.org/
  - od2m 13y ago
    I did not know that, thanks.
qu4z-2 13y ago
I realise you're done with Gentoo, but I just want to make sure people are aware of ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" which automatically installs "unstable" versions of packages. Unstable is pretty damn stable in my experience. Maybe not server-proof, but fine for a desktop.
- rogerbinns 13y ago
  "fresh" means recent, but not "I want to be a tester" :-) From the developer handbook: > The purpose of ~arch is for testing new packages added to Portage. ... The use of ~arch denotes an ebuild requires testing. Most original developers don't release broken packages so in general new versions tend to be stable. This covers the moving from ~arch to arch: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1#doc_chap4_sect4 http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?p... The guideline there is about a month and no outstanding bug reports. That would be perfect, but unfortunately packages lag because it is easier for the maintainer to not mark them stable. It has probably been discussed before, but the inertia being towards things going stable with inaction rather than the other way around would help.

od2m 13y ago

I don't want to identify myself but I was one of the first developers for Gentoo back when it was called Enoch. There was always drama, credit stealing, back-stabbing et all. Arguably the largest contribution I made to the distribution (once again not mentioning specifics to identify myself)... the history of the event was rewritten and I was left out of it entirely. I got the heck out of there. That being said, the founder Daniel Robbins is a nice guy and taught me a lot.

bofussing 13y ago
Daniel Robbins also left, he has since set up a Gentoo meta-distribution called Funtoo http://www.funtoo.org/ http://www.funtoo.org/
- od2m 13y ago
  I did not know that, thanks.

qu4z-2 13y ago

I realise you're done with Gentoo, but I just want to make sure people are aware of ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64" which automatically installs "unstable" versions of packages. Unstable is pretty damn stable in my experience. Maybe not server-proof, but fine for a desktop.

rogerbinns 13y ago
"fresh" means recent, but not "I want to be a tester" :-) From the developer handbook: > The purpose of ~arch is for testing new packages added to Portage. ... The use of ~arch denotes an ebuild requires testing. Most original developers don't release broken packages so in general new versions tend to be stable. This covers the moving from ~arch to arch: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=2&chap=1#doc_chap4_sect4 http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?p... The guideline there is about a month and no outstanding bug reports. That would be perfect, but unfortunately packages lag because it is easier for the maintainer to not mark them stable. It has probably been discussed before, but the inertia being towards things going stable with inaction rather than the other way around would help.