Matt Price wrote: > In an effort to learn a little more about (GNU/)linux I'm thinking of > installing and playing with a bunch of other distributions, just to se > what they're like (and whether it's really possible to survive without > apt-get!). I've been thinking about the following: > > -an rpm-based distro (Mandrake?) That's probably a good choice, though I've heard bad things about Mandrake 9, which I think is their latest. Maybe the current SuSE would be a good alternative. > - do-it-youself source-based distro (linux-from-scratch?) Have fun. It's a big project, but you'll learn a lot. > -and lately I've been hearing lots about how great gentoo is, > apparently because of its 'portage' system. > > does anybody have suggestions or comments about these or other > distros? I don't really understand why gentto is supposed to be so > fabulous. I remember people taking it up on the list way back -- any > enthusiasts out there want to tell me what you love about it? I don't use Gentoo, but I gather what people love about it is that you build everything from source yourself, resulting in a system fully optimized for your hardware (if you know what you're doing). Another benefit is that you may be able to get upgrades faster than Debian can provide them, since we have to have binaries for all architectures. On the downside, it means that upgrades take much longer to perform (building a new KDE can literally take days even on a fast machine), and I imagine it also means that you're more likely to run into problems, because there's no binary package maintainer doing the build for you and verifying that it installs correctly and passes minimal functionality tests. Craig
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