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Yes, this sounds very fair and objective. Thank you for your non-contribution.

That made me laugh, but only because a friend of mine used worked with a guy who compulsively repeated "Simply the best... it's Tina Turner, man" every two or three minutes.

Heh, I definitely prefer the good old way of CLI installation. I can still remember when the devs switched the default from a stage 1 installation to a stage 3 installation. It took me quite a few attempts to get that right - it was suddenly waaaay to easy to install gentoo

For me, it depends on what you use Gentoo for - and hey, if they're offering both types - build your own and prebuilt, its all good.

Then again, I'm tempted to give it ago once I've finished ripping my cd's admittedly I won't be using insane, but it'll be interesting to see just how bloated some distros have become vs. something that is relatively stripped down/clean.

Well, it depends on the definition of "bloated". I'd say my gentoo system is somewhat bloated. Perhaps not as bloated as other Gnome-oriented systems since I'm using an extended version of gnome-light, but still bloated compared with minimalist WM's. OTOH I don't have Beagle, using Tracker instead. The number of python, perl and ruby applications are extremely minimal to reduce clutter and so on. And I don't have kdelibs installed on my gentoo (but then I don't have gnome libraries installed on my DesktopBSD )

Or put another way - as a minimalist system my installation is bloated - I have QT3, QT4, GTK+-2, mono, python, perl, ruby and a "gazillion" use flags (and only a couple of those are disabling functionality)

Almost a full scale Gnome installation but not quite. No Evolution front end (using Pimlico Project instead).

For me, bloat more has to do with boot up/shut down speed - snappiness of the operating system itself; IMHO the price paid for some niceties is far higher than what they actually deliver in the way of improvements.

It's in the kernel sources - just compile the kernel with support for reiserfs.

So still no default reiserfs support?

?

Reiserfs has been supported for years.

wpa_supplicant has featured a gui front-end for some time (wpa_gui) as an alternative to the cli (wpa_cli), it's not distro-specific. You don't see it much though since most distros are either relying on networkmanager or building wpa_supplicant support into their own network subsystem, making it much more transparent.

That could be a tad difficult since there isn't really such a thing as a default installation.


But it could be done though. They could have made a review of what a gentoo system looks like when using the 2007.0/desktop profile. Or the server profile, and compare the profiles with other distributions. But it would be awkward because of the nature of gentoo. And when installed gentoo just tend to work with no further problems. It's getting there which is the difficult thing.

what's there to review?

The target audience doesn't really need one they know.Besides 9 out of 10 install gentoo the "old fashioned way".

The only thing to really focus on in a new Gentoo release is the installer. It was mentioned in the intro that it was an article focused more towards previous Gentoo users, hence the lack of explanation on a lot of things.

It's difficult to review a distro that people are meant to create on their own. Each Gentoo install will be different, depending on tastes.

Gentoo isn't your average distro like ubuntu or Fedora. It is meant for advanced or beginner users who want to learn in the in and out of linux.

So it's completely customizable with flags and other configuration which will make it difficult to review.

Edited 2007-05-13 19:22