And I also found the gain negligeable, if there was one at all. I found the dependency handling miserable. After updating vital parts of the system you had to do so many checks to ensure reverse depends are not broken. And you have every freedom to shoot yourself into the foot. And you will, at some point. If you stick with the stable branch, Gentoo is not particularly up-to-date either. Using the unstable is a pain in the behind.

And, well, at some point I forgot about my Gentoo install. Recencently I booted it once again, tried a system update only to see that it was ultimately impossible because of some complete dependency mess. It was something about a quite central library. If you had been lazy with updates for some time, you had not choice but to reinstall, as was confirmed by several authoritative sources. Would not happen with Debian…

And yes, I bet most ubuntu users skip security updates at least of larger packages, because of the long compilation runs invovled. In Ubuntu, Debian and many others by contrast, security upgrades go largely unattended, they don’t require user intervention.

So, while Gentoo may still retain a high coolness factor, its practical benefit over other distros is by far outweighed by the disadvantages.

I have used many distributions dating back to the early 90s. To this day I am still testing other distributions but always end up with the latest release of Ubuntu back on my system. The number of packages available and their ease of install make Ubuntu my distro of choice.

Just because you are running Ubuntu doesn’t mean you can compile your own source code. If you enable the repositories you can pull down the source code for just about every precompiled binary offered. You can pull down tarballs and compile them yourself just like any other distro.

The key for me is to have a base install that is clean and works with minimal maintenance. Anything else I need that isn’t in the vast repositories (which isn’t much) I compile myself.

I won’t say that Gentoo sucks, but I doubt I will ever use it again.

Cheers!

Im not saying that there no are people might find it usefull. Even if the teacher had a reasonable point to use it I wouldnt complain. But no, he has zero reasons other than “you will be more “smart” that the other ones in the industry”. All the packages for the class are fully compatible with ubuntu, indeed, some are not compatible with Gentoo (well, they are, but it takes too F@cking much to make it so).

The worst thing is that we didn´t get linux classes before, because in the college program there is no f@cking linux teaching, not even in robotics class. But the first homework in robotics is to install Gentoo on minimal in OUR LAPTOPS!…. if I pass this class I will go to the teacher and say “f@ck you and your stupid gentoo and your stupid Phd that you make in Japan (yeah, he has a damn Phd in robotics from Japan, what is he doing now? Teaches in a crappy college, I think he wasnt that good at all ha?. Is not a crappy college is a crappy robotics team… I bet he was the last one of his class).

And the lucky ones that passed his class (maybe there were some “favors”, because the homeworks are only tons and tons of papers to read and not touching the damn robots or computers, very very little programming…. ) are some stupid arrogant pieces of students that feel that they are the f@cking sh!t because they installed Gentoo, now us, the ones that are still using Kubuntu are the noobs and we should be punished with more homework. Gentoo is not for men, is for programming engineers and nothing more. There is no other thing to celebrate, if you want to get elitist too, pull a 360 double flip body varial on a skateboard, I can do it (and maybe no one else) and is not that great.

Gentoo it takes too damn much for a damn operative system to install, you can say “use the guides”, the f@cking guides are too long, sometimes incomprehensible and techincal for an OS. Not even Red Hat in 98 took that long to install, and back in the day the computers had very very very low RAM and CPU capacity. For a mechatronics engineer is useless, indeed for everyone else. Just programming engineers will find it usefull if they hate windows and love and marry linux, they have children Tuxs and find a way to support their linux familly programming for a company without touching windows. Yes, I do think that windows sucks big time, but no company will change to linux because you use it. Also the mankind will die and we will erase the forests, as you see. There is no happy ending, there is no fairy. We are doomed and money beats all sadly.

What would your take be on PHP5 + an MVC framework? Also garbage or best of both worlds?

I see Rails development as going more like this:
+ Use “wizard” to create a base site.
+ Code in whatever the client/project require.
+ Profit (literally) and jump up and down.

PHP:
+ throw a site togther in php, ignoring good design techniques and mashing code and html code together.
+ find out it lacks namespaces (pre 5.3), inheritance has issues with staic methods and etc
+ find out php bloats the memory memory bloat

Debian/Ubuntu is really quite nice, excellent for servers and desktops

One thing they lack is flexibility, which is Gentoo’s strength.
Its not easy to throw an ebuild together or update it to the next version of some software.

Compiled Apps ARE More efficient than packages. Because packages must be compatible with the i686 standard. Because i’m not stupid and have some skills in C/C++. And because packages are compiled with full options (the USE flags in gentoo)

Gentoo has too an excellent support.

The aim of gentoo os has never to be used by beginners !!

The performance and the stability of Ubuntu depends of the kernel or the packages you use, it works OOB, then remove the software that you don’t need or do not enable 3rd part repositories.

Archlinux, Gentoo,.. are good to be forced the Linux OS internals but then, for everyday usage Ubuntu offers the best desktop expirience without compiling by yourself.