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List:       gentoo-dev
Subject:    Re: [gentoo-dev]  Re: DistroWatch and Gentoo packages: status quo
From:       Angelo Arrifano <miknix () gentoo ! org>
Date:       2009-09-21 2:10:18
Message-ID: 4AB6E08A.2010603 () gentoo ! org
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Duncan wrote:
> Sebastian Pipping posted on Sun, 13 Sep 2009 22:00:03 +0200 as excerpted:
> 
>> Duncan wrote:
>>> [L]et's get some context here.  layman's no difficulty at all, really,
>>> when compared to the ordinary stuff we expect Gentoo users to do all
>>> the time.
>> I think you forget about the learning curve: Gentoo users are not born
>> as Gentoo users.  They are coming from other distros (say Debian or
>> Ubuntu).
> 
> Not forgetting that, but perhaps forgetting how "unordinary" my own 
> experience was.  I came from Mandrake, but researched Gentoo well enough 
> that I was already explaining portage basics based on the material in the 
> Handbook, etc, on the user list (and reading the dev list), before I even 
> had Gentoo installed.

My first distro was also Mandrake. I eventually moved endlessly between
Red Hat (before forking into Fedora) and Mandrake. The reason was the
broken rpm package manager (and repo) which had a peculiar way of naming
library .so names which interfered with my "hand-built" packages.

I found Gentoo when a friend of mine told me there was a distro which
was capable of producing CPU *optimized* code because all the packages
were built from source. At the time (6~7 years ago?), I didn't have idea
such distro could exist but that idea made sense and was left hard-coded
in my head.

That is when I read the *Gentoo philosophy* page (yes, there is people
that reads it) and immediately got in love with it. That was Gentoo's
biggest selling point for me. Then the handbook followed and you can
probably guess the rest of the story.

> 
> I like to think that if I can do it, everybody can, but regardless of 
> whether they /can/ or not, it's a fact that not everybody /does/, as 
> demonstrated by the fact that people were asking the questions I was 
> answering.

I think it is not a matter of capable of doing it or not but rather
matching one's needs. It is also a fact that most people *don't get it*
when it comes to the question *why gentoo*.
> 
> I /do/ sometimes forget /that/ end of it, that for whatever reason, not 
> everybody chooses to read the handbook, etc, even if it's ultimately only 
> making the job of sysadmining their own Gentoo boxen an order of 
> magnitude harder than it should be.
> 
>> For me it was unmasking that confused me a lot in the beginning. There
>> is three different kinds, one is not in "the books" afaik and it's no
>> fun to me to do.  I guess without autounmask by now I would be so
>> frustrated to not use Gentoo anymore.

The most confusing stuff for me was to learn all the GNU/Linux basics
that I had as granted while using other distros.

(...)

Just my 2 cents about what mattered to *me* (and still matters) when I
moved to Gentoo.
-- 
Angelo Arrifano AKA MiKNiX
Gentoo Embedded/OMAP850 Developer
Linwizard Developer
http://www.gentoo.org/~miknix
http://miknix.homelinux.com

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