[vox-tech] gentoo's "portage" vs. debian's "apt-get"

[Rod Roark]

On Tuesday 04 November 2003 09:25 am, Edward Elliott wrote:
> Jonathan, I've been using Gentoo as my introduction to Linux. I'll give you a newbies perspective.
> 
> 1) I installed from Live CD. The docs are reasonable and eventually even I got it working.
> 2) Portage is amazingly simple and works well. It also lets you override and customize anything and everything, so I have the sense that for the more adventurous it is both powerful and dangerous.
> 3) Gentoo and Portage are made for high speed systems and fast links to the Internet. I have a 1.7Ghz P4 with RAMBUS memory and several times I have had to let installs/updates run overnight.
> 4) Gentoo and Portage is hard on those without strong technical grounding in UNIX/Linux and kernel compiles. So I'm in big trouble and I've been floundering for a while trying to recover from a kernel compile.
> 
> I'm very impressed with Gentoo and Portage, if you are a person with strong Linux skills and a fast PC I think you would find it very interesting.

I use Gentoo on my desktop and am moderately satisfied.

It's not really for newbies, as you can get stuck in a hurry
if you don't have a solid grounding with Linux and friends.
For example I just did a kernel upgrade which also requires
rebuilding ALSA - something that *should* be taken care of
automatically but is not; you just have to know to do it.

I like it so I can stay updated with recent releases of
things.  However it will not save you time.  Updates can be
very time-consuming - yes they can download/compile/install
while you sleep, but then you often have to deal with
*carefully* merging your settings from old configuration
files into the new ones.

If not for Gentoo I'd probably have Slackware on my desktop.
Don't have much experience with Debian - it may be a good
choice but I'd be a bit concerned about running old
releases of too many packages.

Hope this helps.

-- Rod