Is there any benefit in Gentoo?

[milomak]

So just ran an update on a gentoo system (i7 920 @ 3.8GHz 6GB) that had been idle for some while

real    196m23.570s
user    380m53.501s
sys     58m18.212s

That is over 3 hours of download and compile (1.1GB of download on a 4Mbps line). Probably 15 minutes of the time was hindered by actual waiting for packages to download.

It strikes me that gentoo can't have much more in convincing people to use it.

or am i missng something?

On a 4meg line,

 

[MyWorld]

I do not think there is any real benefits with todays CPU's. I left because it became a nightmare to maintain with the overlays.
Arch, for me, has struck a balance between power and usability, I can never feel at home with any other distro.

Compiling everything from scratch, for over 3 hours is going to gain you how much of a performance boost? Negligible IMHO.

* Gentoo offered a package manager similar to ports on BSD when there was none in Linux. In the olden days you had to hunt down the developers site to find the software update you were looking for, hours a day wasted on Google. Nowadays every single distro has a well maintained packaging system, so not needed for that anymore.

* Gentoo offered bleeding edge software and updates. In the old days distros only did security updates and only upgraded software on a new distro version release. If you wanted an update of software for a specific reason, see above.
This propelled Linux app development into the future, developers now had a reason to release regular updates of their apps. Nowadays all distros offer bleeding edge with either "testing", "unstable", etc. repos to try out.

* Gentoo gave you an escape from dependency hell with their package manager being able to locate and satisfy all needed dependant libs, etc, something that was implemented in other distros but not nearly as polished as emerge. Emerge was light years ahead of the rest.
This led to system maintenance being a breeze in the beginning. Now every single distro offers this.

This is all I could think of quickly. Gentoo did it's part for Linux in early 2000-2004, and there is no doubt in my mind that it played a vital part in getting Linux distros organized and maintained within set standards, but with the powerhouse CPU's of today and distros having adopted everything Gentoo once stood for, I see no need other than curiosity or for learning more of Linux that one would try Gentoo.

That said, everyone ever wanting to create their own distro should first get to grips with Gentoo or LFS to learn how to optimize a distro before just spinning off another *buntu clone.

 

[stricken]

i prefer cold, hard, untainted, Debian

 

[Murmaider]

Back in the day, Gentoo was awesome and it's package manager was the best out their. The ability to customize the gcc complainer for your processor for performance was a real novalty.
I must was a massive Gentoo fan (My_World, Dave/Adelante here). But in this day and age you will get pretty much the same performance from a ubuntu server machine and possibly a hell of a lot more stability.

 

[ponder]

Only if you're into S&M.

 

[bin3]

I still love it, and with local mirrors downloads are very seldom a problem. Run a private mirror and update all my other machines from that, so downloads in general are kept to a minimum.

My love for, and skill in, Linux all comes from days spend wrangling Gentoo to do what I want. This definitely was in the early 2000's, and have just stuck with them all this time. Will be the first to admit that most of the community have moved away from Gentoo and is probably spread around the Ubuntu / SUSE / and other distributions, and I think this was the real power of Gentoo: the community.

I don't think you can go wrong going Gentoo: It's very seldom that you still would do a full stage 1 install: most installs are now stage 3 based: so you can usually have a basic system up and running in 30 minutes or so. But then the fun starts: Do a quick download and install of KDE and after the weekend come back and start configuring it ...

I tend to run about 3 machines with distributed compile switched on; so this tends to help such big installs in a 'big' way.

I think, in my personal opinion: If you want something to tinker with, nothing wrong with Gentoo and a lot of advantages in using Gentoo.

If you want something to just run and work with minimal effort: stay away from Gentoo.

 

[MyWorld]

* Gentoo offered a package manager similar to ports on BSD when there was none in Linux. In the olden days you had to hunt down the developers site to find the software update you were looking for, hours a day wasted on Google. Nowadays every single distro has a well maintained packaging system, so not needed for that anymore.

* Gentoo gave you an escape from dependency hell with their package manager being able to locate and satisfy all needed dependant libs, etc, something that was implemented in other distros but not nearly as polished as emerge. Emerge was light years ahead of the rest.
This led to system maintenance being a breeze in the beginning. Now every single distro offers this.

Just had a flashback on trying to install a new version release of KDE on Mandrake 7.2/8.0 *SHUDDER*

OT:
Hi there Dave, check your PM!