On Saturday 10 May 2008, Alan McKinnon wrote: > Ah, but www.gentoo.org/doc actually does contain decent INFORMATION in a > manner that I can find.
Right, but I can think of better ways to search through it by category, by keyword, by arch, by whatever, than just use Google. > All I ever seem to get out of ubuntu.com (after the cute front page) is > the equivalent of Ubuntu For Dummies or endless chitter-chatter on web > forums almost exclusively populated by 14 year olds. Or people mentally > equivalent to 14 year olds. I haven't visited Ubuntu for more than a year and a half now and back then it seemed to me that it was comparatively easier to find what I was after. > gentoo is a lot like Ferraris, Buells and Crays - virtually nobody, but > nobody, gets involved with them without being quite knowledgeable about > the subject as a whole and having a very good idea of what they are all > about. Sure, but there will be the few select who will decide to cut their teeth into Linux with Gentoo. I will always warn them and then welcome them. > Let's put it another way. Person X from company Y is evaluating distros > and is put off by www.gentoo.org's front page. Right. Now, what kind of > user is person X do you think? Someone who will be able to use Gentoo > to it's full potential right away? No, I don't think so. If you need to > read the front page to find out the basics of what it is, then you > shouldn't be anywhere near Gentoo as a corporate. You'd be much better > off looking into the well-known binary distros. I can't but agree. Gentoo is a labour of love, not a 15 minute install script for a busy sysadmin who's used to binary distros. > I'm not spouting steam out my nose here. My day job is looking after 20 > gentoo servers out in the wild at customer's premises. My personal > machines have been exclusively gentoo for over 3 years now. I'm > migrating the customer's machines over to Ubuntu server LTS one by one > as the hardware gets upgraded. Why? Why does someone, who is well known > in my city for being the biggest Gentoo fan around, do that? > > Because I cannot deal with the learning curve of my juniors anymore. I > don't want to have to still make every USE related decision on every > machine even though a junior is sitting right there logged in. It makes > complete sense for $ARB_UBUNTU_DEV to make those decisions instead. The last server I installed for a customer was an OpenSuse . . . I haven't had a single call in the last 8 months (other than to thank me for a nice server!) > So let's tidy up gentoo.org by all means and make it a bit more obvious > how this awesome thing called portage works. But lets not be deceived > into thinking the distro itself is a mass-market distro because it > isn't. It's more like a magnificent hand-made piece of fine Italian > machinery. And I like it that way. Absolutely, so do I. On the other hand, I am inclined to give every help and opportunity to a willing Gentoo starter. I am not for a minute suggesting that Gentoo is a broad appeal Linux system. All I am saying is let's make a small effort to present it in a more user friendly way - we're not gaining anything by unnecessarily alienating potential Gentoo advocates. -- Regards, Mick
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