Hey there :) I'm starting a new thread about people switching to other distributions. Why? Because I'd rather we start first with an information-gathering thread.
I'm shortly going to relate my first-hand knowledge of why people have switched from Debian, to Gentoo. Everybody else who has any first-hand knowledge about it, please relate your experiences too. Also, if you know of somebody who was thinking "Hmmm, Debian or Gentoo?", and they chose Gentoo, do tell why. (I don't know anybody who's been in that situation, unfortunately. I think they've probably got great insights. Joey's comments on the web site would probably also come from somebody in this group of Gentoo users.) If you don't have any first-hand knowledge, please don't respond to this thread. We'll start a "what do we do with this knowledge now?" thread later. Okay, so, my experiences. I've watched about three dozen people from #debian "switch" to Gentoo. About two dozen of them switched simply because it was cool. I mean, these people showed up in #debian because they had tried Slackware and failed miserably (yes. This happens like every other day). Now they were trying Debian, because it was the next step up in the coolness meter. No, I'm not just assuming these people are idiots :) I actually talk to them privately, help them out, and whatnot. The other third of people I've watched switched just wanted something new to play with. Would have been FreeBSD, probably, if Gentoo hadn't been around. Most of them have already tried SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, and their ilk. One person had a very good reason - they had a client whose company policy was to use specific gcc flags (can't remember which, but IIRC they had something to do with hardware stability and debugging) - Gentoo let them do that more easily. Anybody else?
pgpuDqpwBovp8.pgp
Description: PGP signature