is the control gentoo gives you necessary?

[happybunny]

i never mean to start fights with my posts, and this is no exception, but:

This thought came to me during an IRC chat with someone who was pushing Gentoo over RH (you know who you are).

With the blazing speed of todays hardware like AMD64, Intel XEON, 800mhz FSB, fast memory, SATA 10,000rpm drives, is the control that a distro like gentoo gives you necessary?

For instance, does it really matter if you compile your software with just a little more compile options than you really need? If you had 2 gentoo machines on 2 identical pieces of hardware, and you compiled one with "extra" options, and one with bare minimum compile options, would you really notice a speed difference in the 2?

I could see if you had minimum hardware, but does it really matter on a fast box?

I started a thread earlier about which distro, and most people said that the package management system was why they picked this or that distro....I know how much people love their emerge's, but I hope to keep this thread based on the compile options gentoo gives you. Does it really matter that much?

[gehidore]

I like parts of the gentoo community, in my redhat days I asked once on irc if someone could help me with a 2.4.* kernel and working out why it panicked every time i ran shutdown -h now.

I was flamed and banned in under 5 minutes.

[j79zlr]

I find the speed difference negligible, as you said with fast hardware it isn't noticeable. It might be on a P2, but who wants to wait hours for things to compile on a slow machine. I was a long time slack user, but I eventually found myself compiling alot of my own slackpkg's to use my own ./configure arguments, and when they pulled Gnome support, that was it for me. I had tried Gentoo in the past and wasn't impressed, but I wasn't as patient with it then as I was this go, and I must say I like it very much [I do still think FreeBSD's ports are better designed].

[blobaugh]

I don't really care much about the whole optimized for speed thing because there is really not much difference between gentoo's speed and say that of slackware or some other distro. There are two real things I like about it

1. Completely customized to me. No unnecessary software.
2. The package management (portage) is incredible and I no longer have to worry about dependencies

[tuxnewb]

Not trying to start a flame war but are you serious....

quote: "Does it really matter that much?" (Happy Bunny)

Of course ever ounce of optimization that one can get matters...I own a reletivley mid-range PC so anything I can get I take...Linux is not just about freedom its also about being able to bring life into old pc's and such....gentoo was just installed on my box and i only have around 40 processes running at any given time...and I must say that it runs VERY WELL...

thanks my 2 cents

Tuxnewb

[Uranus]

I used slack for some time in between (gentoo) and I definitely noticed the difference. And I don't think that the amount of control has very much to do with hardware - rather with customization. And I think that is awfully important (me is control freak). I like it very much that my system is very clean - nothing that I don't want clutters my disk. And I've learned _so_ much using gentoo (generally because of using gentoo) which I think is important as well.
And I think that FreeBSD relates to gentoo in that exact same way (more customization, steeper learning curve). And it's more stable.
Sam

[fatTrav]

I found on my main system that gentoo is just a lot faster than slackware. It might be because the system is a bit leaner but applications do launch a bit faster.

The Cflag settings I use are pretty sane just optimized for my athlon. ("-O2 -march=athlon-xp -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" to get specific).

But the USE flags really tickle my fancy. They are the real reason I love gentoo. It makes portage and everything just easier to use knowing that all packages are compiled in with some of my favorite options (things like always having java, gnome, and postgres but not mysql options compiled)

Also Gentoo is really the only distro that spends time/money/effort on documentation. And actually has it as a priority and not just a side-project. Though the documentation isn't as clear as it should be, it is really great and covers a lot of different topics. I've learned a lot though their documentation. Also the forums aren't that bad, but not that great in my opinion. At least they don't compare to this forum.

[janet loves bill]

Eh, I'd rather have the control that Linux from Scratch gives me............

and on my 3 boxes LFS is a little faster than Slack........but not be much.

[drummerboy195]

I have found two advantages to Gentoo over Mandrake, which is what I was using previously. First, although urpmi is very good, and has come along very nicely in the past few years, but portage blows it away by far. Additionally, I would have unexplained instances under Mandrake where things would work, and then they would stop for no good reason. I have not seen anything like that thus far under Gentoo. All I have to do for system maintenence is run emerge sync and emerge -update world every once in a while.

[Uranus]

Actually, the one thing I don't like about gentoo is its use variable - I prefer an at the moment system over it by far (like Source Mage and FreeBSD do it).
Sam

[CoffeeMan]

I have learned sooo much from my Gentoo installation, that I damn near doubled my knowlege of Linux just installing/maintaining my system. And when you get it to where you want it, it will stay that way. I have never seem a distro that was so efficient, stable, and customizable to the last drop. And not to mention portage completely eliminates the need to re-install to update to the newest version. For example, I can use portage to upgrade portage. I can get the newest packages because I don't have to wait for someone else to compile the software, it takes too long. And I certainly don't want to hand-compile all of the packages that get released. emerge will do it for me.

That's my 2 cents.

[bosox79]

I love Gentoo becuse it gives me total control over my system. and yess I have noticed some apps are faster. but some of the main reason's I love gentoo are the community and emerge. Emerge has made system adminstrtaion so easy.

[duncanbojangles]

I found on my main system that gentoo is just a lot faster than slackware. It might be because the system is a bit leaner but applications do launch a bit faster.
I've heard of Gentoo being faster than many other distros such as RedHat, Suse, and Mandrake, which doesn't surprise me, but this is the first time I've heard that Gentoo was significantly faster than Slackware!

I think that the knowledge gained from using Gentoo could be applied to similar distros such as Slackware and Debian (and knockoffs)to achieve comparable results. Optimization flags, killing unnecessary processes and stopping them from starting up, etc. are well applied to said distros.

As someone said before (can't remember who), "If someone has a problem with Gentoo, they have a problem with Linux. Gentoo IS Linux." I think that for the most part this statement is true and shows. People who use Gentoo, really use Gentoo, have a very good understanding of Linux.

So, my answer is "Yes", the control Gentoo gives you is necessary to make you a better Linux user.

[Parcival]

Gentoo's customization is it for me, too, not necessarily the compiling options, although I have tweaked, them, too.

I migrated from SuSE 9.0 to Gentoo and have to say they are like night and day. When you install SuSE with YaST there comes tons of bloat you don't even know you install it and start it at boot time. With Gentoo this simply can't happen.

Currently I have a SuSE 9.1/Gentoo dualboot. I'm using Gentoo 99.9% of the time while SuSE is being booted when I need to fix my Gentoo after I screwed it up or when I need SuSE's hardware auto-detection because I was too lazy to configure it in Gentoo yet. :)

[Hayl]

1. Gentoo is _not_ faster than other distros (that anyone is going to notice in a big way - possibly with a ton of benchmarking but probably not even then.) - total fallacy

2. Yes, you can optimize/customize all packages to your needs... meaning you remove / add kde or gnome support, png support, ssl support, etc if you do or do not want them on a per pacakge or global basis

3. is the amount of control necessary? - no... but, if you want that kind of control then go for it