Gentoo - A love/hate relationship

[Rodneyck]

Ok, I have this love/hate relationship with Gentoo and Gentoo-based distros. I love many of its features, but mostly, I love it for its lightening fast speed as compared to other distros. I assume this has to do with everything being compiled and dependencies configured into one big mashed potato that works, for the most part. I really want to love it. I do, envious of people who report good things, really.

However, after several failed attempts at Sabayonlinux, the most recent a few days ago trying the bloated 3.26 DVD... again, I always seem to run into something that makes it either so frustratingly complex to make work or something that makes the distro to unreliable to have as a main working environment.

I finally gave up on Sabayon, at least until the next version. I instead, searched for another distro that was Gentoo-based in hopes this would provide better results and less frustration. Surprisingly, I have only found one other, Kororaa.

Kororra comes in two flavors, the livecd (which was not so live for me, ie it did not boot up, no matter what I tried) and the install cd (2 cds to be exact.) After installing, I was met with a lovely KDE system that like Sabayon, was lightening fast, maybe even faster as this version installed without beryl or any 3D desktop. After I started to dig around a bit, I noticed that everything was a bit outdated. It seems there is only one developer working on Kororaa and updates leapfrog several months at a time. Actually, correction, years to be more exact, as the non-livecd version was released in 2005. This is the version I used and we are talking way outdated.

To update, meant I had to basically update KDE, x server, then everything else. In theory, or in Debian world, this would not be such an odious task, but in Gentoo, this meant headache(s) and ambiguous instructions. I started to do this but immediately, as has happened in Sabayon, the user is met with masked dependencies and tons of questionable errors in part due to...dependent apps. After reading through their forum, the general consenses was "...well, it's not going to be easy to update, so good luck with that." I concluded that it would be easier to just install pure Gentoo and start anew, than to go through all the trouble updating everything in Kororaa and deal with things being broken in the end, which was very likely from their forum topics.

So this brought me to the question of, should I Gentoo or not Gentoo? I find it strange that there are not a lot of distros based off of Gentoo and the two I have found, most users of Sabayon and Koraraa do not update their systems through Gentoo repos themselves, but instead wait for the developers to release a new upgrade (CD/DVD) to obtain main features of their system. Sure, adding amule might be easy, but just try and update to KDE 3.5.6 for all its bugfixes. OUCH!!

As I have pointed out, Kororaa has too slow of a release cycle, for me, and Sabayon has recently lost half of its developers, reporting that their next release will be slowed down as a result. Again, more waiting for functions that could be a click away in a Debian-based world.

I then found this piece written by a longtime Gentoo user that addresses many of the problems and questions I have and have found in both Sabayon and Kororra. If you are wondering about this distro or have bludgeoned you head into the wall asking, "Is it just me?", then give this a read and decide for yourself.

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2006/11/21...not-to-gentoo/