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May 13, 2005 by Keith Kastorff.
I’ve become a Gentoo advocate. I’ve installed Gentoo before, but it didn’t “stick”; I guess I wasn’t quite ready at the time. In the last few months, I’ve loaded Vidalinux 1.1 on two machines, which is a Gentoo 2004.3 stage 3 install married to Fedora Core’s Ananconda graphical installer. It’s like Gentoo without the hassle of loading Gentoo.
Portage gives me the power I’ve been wanting with my software, but it extracts a heavy price…time. Compiling everything from source takes a long time…and as much as Linux changes, if you want to be up to date, you’re gonna be compiling a lot. The good news is, with Linux’s ability to multitask and still be responsive to normal use, you can do this while using the machine. Windows XP would be unusable under the same load.
I still use SuSE 9.3 on my laptop, because it’s a great laptop distro. It keeps me aware of the advantages and disadvantages of a binary Linux distro. I can load/upgrade software in a very short while compared to Gentoo, but I don’t have the selection or configurability I have with Gentoo. As always, Linux seems to provide options that fit my needs…SuSE on the laptop…Vidalinux/Gentoo on the desktop.
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