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