Gentoo

It has been a long time since I have blogged on this and a lot has changed.  A little over a year ago I finally got fed up with Slackware.  It has been lagging behind too much with updates and I was spending more time trying to update core packages just to get an application compiled, than I was spending time doing anything else.  A lot has changed in linux over the years.  There are a lot of developers and projects move much faster now.  Slackware although "stable" is lagging behind quite considerably in my opinion and running -current was getting annoying with breakages.  So, I dumped Slackware completely.  I tried ArchLinux for a little, but it was not to my liking.  I enjoyed pacman but unfortunately the distribution just wasn't working out for me the way I wanted.  Then I looked at openSUSE.  I have played with it on and off for many years and wanted to give it another go.  I gave it a good full month or two but again, it just was not a good fit for me.  So I took a look at Gentoo and immediately found this is the distribution for me.  I have been running Gentoo on four boxes for about a year now.  Even my server is now on Gentoo after dumping Slackware.  The downside of Gentoo is, you have to compile EVERYTHING.  That means if you have QT5 in your makefile, it can be a total PITA.  Other than that.  I have so far enjoyed my switch and have been wondering why I waited so long to move.  The problem with Slackware is everything is controlled by one person.  Linux is just too huge these days for one person to track everything.  It needs a team of people, but I do not see this happening anytime soon or ever.  Gentoo certainly has a learning curve, Portage still has a lot of things I do not yet know.  I have tried to write a few build scripts but I really have no idea what I am doing.  It took me longer than I wanted to understand the whole make.conf logic, but once I figured that out it made a ton of sense.  The Gentoo wiki is heavily outdated, which is a downside, the community does not seem too concerned with keeping their wiki site up to date.  But like every other linux community they are full of narcissism and egos, so, not much we can do about the whole anti-social aspect of the geek world.  If I remember, I will post my Gentoo notes.