Why gentoo shouldnt be on your server

I will have to do more documentation and create a custom installation guide Many years ago there were stage 2 and 1 for installations from scratch, today with stage 3 you just have to install the kernel and edit text files. Excellent article, I've been wanting to try Slackware and Gentoo for a long time, but unfortunately I don't have the time. I've been using Arch for eight years, and the last time I did a full install I opted for Antergos to save time.

For some Linuxers like me, work is a curse, the other would be marriage fortunately I have not fallen for the latter yet XD. Piece of post. Gentoo unfinished business. Slackware was fine for me when I tried it, but waiting to compile really killed me…. Yesterday I got down to work and installed it in a moment, about two hours, plus all night compiling and for now everything is perfect.

Hello: Out of curiosity What advantages do you see gentoo over arch and derivatives on the home computer? As 1st- Arch and derivatives are also rolling release. So you might think that gentoo is for scientific tasks and supercomputers, since it is a safe supercomputer that compiles almost on the spot.

I repeat this, they are my ignorance since in linux I have only installed ubuntu gnome on my computer first and then replaced it with manjaro gnome.

A few days ago I tested the gentoo live that was released in August in a virtual machine and the first thing KDE started, however I am going to try it again by closing the session and opening a gnome session, as stated in this post, I tried the portage sync and then it told me to run I think sudo emerge —oneshot emerge I did it and after 26 minutes it got stuck, I had compiled 2 out of 3 packages. In short, on paper it seems too complicated to have it at home. This post is the best animation to know and install Gentoo that I have ever read.

I have been a Gentoo user for just 5 months. Especially debianites and archers have it on the verge of caramel. An ubunter is not that you can't install Gentoo, but it will suffer a little more. After installing Archlinux many times I have learned a lot about many things that with user-friendly distros I would never have understood, then I saw a post on how to install Gentoo and I was encouraged until I knew that my machine was crap.

Now seeing this post one of the best and most complete I have seen on this page made me want to try Gentoo, I will launch to do the installation from my Archlinux. If you can tell the difference in "poor" machines, I think it's worth doing it, especially to learn. That usually happens if you don't have the dbus service active, I use slim and without dbus it gives me slim without entering openbox.

Yes, if I made sure that Dbus is active and working, it always gave me the message cannot display manager,. Brutal, it is something that I have pending but I never dared, and the more I read it seems that the less and less I am encouraged, especially by time.

Some time will be, when I have time, a weekend I will dedicate, to install it in a partition. Hello, good post, I was inspired by it to finally decide to install Gentoo, it took me a couple of days to get it started, but it is already functional, with a core athlon 1. The process reminds me of a phrase. Install Funtoo and everything went great, above all, I can say that installing an OS like this is very entertaining, that is the main grace hehehehehe. As an Arch user for years, when I finish reading this post, I really want to install Gentoo.

I've really always been curious, but I've never had time to spend a few days researching myself and trying to install this distro Congratulations on such a great post!

I read the whole post. Interesting article and especially the subject of compiling. If I had more time I would encourage myself to try it. For now I'm sticking with Linux Mint by default. Very good post, I remember now that my first distro was slack, I switched to ubuntu, I went to dragora and then I used Calculate Linux which is super fast or better it was. But I had a big problem in the official gentoo forum they didn't answer my questions, for example I didn't understand the term Flag flag a flag for what?

Your post is very good, for me Calculate linux is still the best I used was a rock. But what you mention about pentiums and old pcs are the ones that I have a pentium 4 is the oldest and I was already thinking and I am left with even more doubts since the kernels are updated if a gentoo could be used for those old machines if a user catches it no gentoo - portage experience. Calculate linux is very good, I never did an installation of gentoo by manual but I liked the system very much, who knows I will not use calculate or gentoo in the future.

Thanks for sharing. Thanks to this article, it gave me the will and strength of will to finally install gentoo…. I am 16 years old and I always had problems installing this distribution I have been using Linux for three years and my favorite distro so far was debian then I went to Manjaro a few months ago and now I ended up in Gentoo, after all it was not so difficult to compile and install. All they have to do is read the manual. The best method to install is the Gentoo handbook but you can do it in Virtualbox.

What takes you 3 hours on your real machine is duplicated on the virtual machine. But I would tell you that if you have patience you can install the base system, the X and XFCE which is the lightest desktop.

What good memories! After trying some distros of the time - I would not like to be wrong, but I think I have tried at least the best known at that time and even some that no longer exist - my research period ended and I opted for two distros that became my preferred: Slackware and Gentoo; and the ones he used to say… "Slackware is the ideal wife and Gentoo the perfect lover.

I have been using Gentoo since mid , my migration was abrupt, since I switched from mandrake to this one. Hello, very good note, I have used gentoo for a short time, I was struck by compiling the operating system myself, then I left it because I had to read a lot, I went to Ubuntu, then debian, opensuse, arch the latter I I fascinate and now I return but recharged.

I would like to know what happened to the founder of gentoo, so did he walk away? Greetings from Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina. The truth is I want to congratulate you because it is a good post, you explain what many times I do not understand by lazy or because it is too complex, the truth is I am trying to install gentoo and I have already achieved it, not perfectly but at least I compile and those Questions, now, I would like to ask you if you have managed to install it together with windows 8 or 8.

And in the case of the flags, do you think this is fine? And also I can not install it together with windows 8. Hello, if you are going to touch CFLAGS, which is very important when compiling from any source, Gentoo has a good explanation of how to determine the best option.

I have an Intel i5 processor; I guess I shouldn't have any problems. What should I do in this case? I have been a linux user for almost 20 years or a little less. I started using "mandrake linux". I suffered in those days, like Red Hat users, the blessed rpm packages. After about a year and a half, I went to debian Day and night I seemed to have had an impressive jump. After a little over two years or less, I took a chance to try Gentoo Linux.

I got a computer just for it, to test it. At that time, gentoo was installed from the "bootstrap", at that time the installation took about 3 days. But even though I believed that with debian, linux could not improve, I was very surprised. I've had gentoo installed as a desktop, as a server, on the notebook, I could never leave it.

At this moment I have a mac book pro mid , with a gentoo linux. I do not get tired of writing when I can, how great is this operating system. The incredible flexibility it has. I remember that I even had a cyber cafe, in which I had only put one machine to manage internet traffic.

An old machine that was almost scrapped, with several input and output ethernet boards. Logically, a graphical environment was never installed.

But with it, I was able to simulate more than two adsl connections and manage the traffic to the internal relay at a professional level. That of the young people who have installed Gentoo has caught my attention, I am 15 years old and being one of the few people who has installed Gentoo is a good challenge although I suppose there will be more people today , I would have to to spend a lot of time, since I have experience but I don't think so much either, maybe at 15 I can't I have a month left , but at 16 I don't rule out the possibility.

He stopped development and spent months using and mastering FreeBSD to find a way to improve it, finally creating the most advanced packaging system, the cornerstone of Gentoo, Portage Table of Contents 1 Who uses it? Arch, Gentoo in 10 minutes? Did you know that Sabayon's binary package manager equo is in the official Gentoo repository?

Can be used in theory, but is not guaranteed to work and should be used with caution. Legitimation: Your consent Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation. I want to receive the newsletter. Reply to elav. Reply to eliotime Xurxo said ago 7 years. Thank you for taking the time to write this post. An old Slackware user thanks you.

I wish you the best for the year that begins in a few hours! Reply to Xurxo. Alberto Cardona said ago 7 years. Reply to Alberto Cardona. Rafiki said ago 7 years. One of the best distributions that I use, I started using it when I was 20 years old, at that time my right-hander was Fedora, in Gentoo I understood how to install Linux at its maximum capacity from configuring the system time zone to configure kernel modules and compile the same, all on a shell and with the opportunity to handle the variables to my liking in the compilation It seems to me an excellent distribution and one of the best.

Reply to Rafiki. Reply to zarvaje. Victor said ago 7 years. Reply to victor. Daniel said ago 7 years. Reply to Daniel. Yoyo said ago 7 years.

Let me get down on my knees and bow to you. Reply to Yoyo. Reply to weyland-yutani. Drarko said ago 7 years. Reply to Drarko. The truth is that the article makes me want to install Gentoo or Funtoo. Reply to yippekay. TUDz said ago 7 years.

I hope once I have my title in hand I cheer up xD. Reply to TUDz. Reply to juanma. Jorgicio said ago 7 years. Reply to Jorgicio. Reply to neysonv. Jose GDF said ago 7 years. On this that you comment, it would be interesting to expand in another post. I drop it Reply to santiago alessio. Ictineu said ago 7 years. Reply to Ictineu. Pablo said ago 7 years. Reply to Pablo. Reply to diazepan. Reply to luisgac.

Reply to arkhan. Juan said ago 7 years. Reply to Juan. Alejandro said ago 7 years. Hi John, Of course! Reply to Alejandro. Reply to daryo. Room said ago 7 years. Reply to Room. Ivan Barra said ago 7 years. Tremendous piece of post. The problem is me, I am so lazy that I think that Slackware has already been enough for me. Greetings and Congratulations. Have nice parties. Tedel said ago 7 years.

Hello: I'm using Sabayon now which is a preconfigured Gentoo , but moving to Gentoo is still one line on the to-do list. Reply to Tedel. I'm afraid to even try to install it, you have to have a lot of knowledge. Reply to trisuqle. Brutico said ago 7 years. If you've used a distro like Arch, reading the gentoo wiki and forum is not very difficult. Reply to Brutico. ChC said ago 7 years.

As long as you read a guide or the famous handbook Reply to ChC. Jovan molina said ago 7 years. Reply to Jovan Molina. Anyway, excellent post. Reply to petercheco. Reply to mario. Angel Miguel Fernandez placeholder image said ago 7 years. What a gem!! Happy New Year and thank you for elevating our culture. Reply to Angel Miguel Fernandez.

Reply to pandev Well, it shows a lot, for example in chromium it does not suck ram as much as in Arch. Pancha lopez said ago 7 years. Reply to Pancha Lopez. Bill said ago 7 years. Reply to Guillermo. Jesus Ballesteros said ago 7 years. Too bad there are no "Like" buttons here. Piece of publication, what a beauty.

Reply to paluza. Sebastian said ago 7 years. Reply to Sebastian. Wisp said ago 7 years. Reply to Brizno. Bla bla bla said ago 7 years. But in some short sequences the camera glances over a screen where source code or command lines are shown.

This is of course somewhat based on that I claim that there are more than ten billion curl installations in the world. How many curl installations does an average person have? Amusingly, someone also asked me this question at curl presentation I did recently. But no crazy estimates, just reasonable ones! In the curl project we keep track of and say thanks to every single contributor. That includes persons who report bugs or security problems, who run infrastructure for us, who assist in debugging or fixing problems as well as those who author code or edit the website.

Those who have contributed to make curl to what it is. Exactly today October 4th , we reached 2, names in this list of contributors for the first time. Not bad at all. Good time of day, fellow spacemen. Version 1. It allows you to sell your content or buy others' and have it served transparently and with no friction. Google has announced the annual Google Summer of Code GSoC event aimed at encouraging newbies to work on open source projects.

The event is being held for the seventeenth time, but it differs from previous programs in the removal of restrictions on the participation of only undergraduate and graduate students. From now on, any adult who has turned 18 years old can become a GSoC participant, but with the condition that he has not previously made a significant contribution to the development of projects outside the GSoC event and has not participated in the GSoC more than two times. It is understood that the event will now be able to help beginners who want to change their field of activity or are engaged in self-education.

The software package is released under an unusual license: EUPL ITFlow is a web-based self-hosted IT-asset management system that users can download, install and configure on a local or a remote system. The transition from centralized fossil-fuel generation to renewable and distributed energy resources will mark the most significant reimagining of power systems in over years, and it will fundamentally transform our economies.

By adopting an open source strategy that maximizes flexibility, agility, and interoperability, we can innovate at the speed of the urgency needed to decarbonize and save our planet. I was impressed how everything worked well and I like where Fedora is going overall. Less pre-installed software, I am hoping for more packages to be dropped - Evolution backend, on-line accounts, Maps and others.

Overall, it works great. In recent years, continuous fuzzing has become an essential part of the software development lifecycle. By feeding unexpected or random data into a program, fuzzing catches bugs that would otherwise slip through the most thorough manual checks and provides coverage that would take staggering human effort to replicate. With just a few lines of code, GitHub users can integrate ClusterFuzzLite into their workflow and fuzz pull requests to catch bugs before they are committed, enhancing the overall security of the software supply chain.

Do you waddle the waddle? Language Selection. Search Search this site:. Active forum topics Montblanc sails the chronometry seas Sky Recommended Add-ins and Links Sweatin' out the hits, maybe a shower or two.

Collabora Kernel 5. Home » content. The Good The system is better than most Linux systems I have seen when it comes to general package management and installation. Twelve Years of Go Today we celebrate the twelfth birthday of the Go open source release. And then, it gets the trivial updates done for me, and puts me into vimdiff anytime any decision is required.

At most times, this means no downtime at all, as everything runs smoothly. In case of a kernel upgrade, or anything going wrong once till now , we still have redundancy. So there are no visible drawbacks of using Gentoo on those servers Unless I, and my boss, am missing something. Re: Score: 3 , Interesting. Gentoo does reasonably well with configuration stuff certainly better than any other system I've seen , but I still think it should be better; it'd be really nice if upgrades that change config files would be built but not installed, and then you'd be guided through updating the config fi.

Redhat 6. I ran RedHat 6. Dude, that's not too cool. IMHO, that was back when there were some more serious remote exploits. Re: Score: 2. RedHat 6. I feel it's flaws are the only reason I know anything about linux Re:Redhat 6. Are you kidding? This reminds me of the old adage about the 20 year old broom. Dude, install NTP. Then you could have kept the machine going without those useless capacitors!

That would have had around days uptime if my reboot-happy Windows-only-admin coworkers wouldn't have reset it in a panic on multiple occasions to "troubleshoot" no it was never a problem with my OpenBSD box mail problems. I don't know what the hell it is with Windows-only admins and rebooting. The kind of instability that required reboots all the time was reduced drastically with Win2k and win2k3, yet that insatiable urge to reboot first and ask questions later still plauges my Windows-only counterparts.

Score: 4 , Informative. I agree. Every now and then a program's latest version doesn't agree with a config script somewhere, but that's what etc-update is for. If something borks, you can always ask the gentoo forums [gentoo. That and the gentoo-wiki [gentoo-wiki. Also, no one is 'requiring' anyone to upgrade.

I administer hundreds of gentoo servers and you don't always need to keep up to date to be secure. Part of the nice thing about gentoo is that you're only installing the packages you need, so if you know of a vulnerability in a script you use, you don't have to upgrade your whole portage tree just to plug a hole.

Now that there are things like CentOS, I've actually gotten tired of dealing wit. CentOS updates Score: 2 , Interesting. At risk of exposing my ignorance here I'm a Debian person; the last time I did anything RedHat-based was before automatic package management , what is CentOS's automatic-update feature like? Not that you'd. I had a simular problem but it was a little worse. Re: Score: 2 , Insightful.

This article is FUD. If people don't know ho. And that my friend, is the niche Opensolaris will quickly start filling. So, you upgraded from the old 1. You also seem to failed the "sentient sys-admin test" by not using 'google' to do some research. I run Gentoo on my own machine, and most of my users WANT bleeding edge versions, a lot of custom options here and there.

The system is using a hardened kernel, stack protection and everything is compiled for 64bit k8. I don't know of any distros that can do that for every package.

So far I have had 1 package problem, and that was resolved by 'uncaching' some stuff and redo the emerge of that package. In general, gentoo is easy to maintain, provided you update regularly. Compiler time is a non-issue, i'm not running X, soundcards, usb, video drivers, gui-browsers etc, there's not all that much to upgrade. It should be noted that I sync the portage tree from a euro-mirror to a local mirror 6 times a day, and having meg a sec to the files-repository makes downloads take an average of seconds.

Coupled with two beefy processors and lots of ram, Gentoo is brilliant for me. And yes, I have permission from the rsync-maintainer to synch that often. Some serious crack smoking Gentoo allows you to be on the cutting edge, just like all the other distributions. The primary difference is it makes it very easy for those who don't know what they are doing to be there. There is nothing stopping one of the 'normal' distributions from upgrading the kernel with each release.

I certainly don't update everything on my Gentoo box because it is there, on my server. I run Gentoo on a server. The server is stripped down beyond what a typical 'router' distro looks like - one of the reasons I went with Gentoo is I could really trim the system down for the job at hand. My server only gets updates for security, and once in a while a bug fix that impacts the applications running on the server.

Not often. When I need to compile something big, the last place I'd do it on is the server itself - it has another task. I take one of my workstations with far more GCC horsepower and let distccd [gentoo. Beyond the initial build, I doubt those boxes have ever compiled anything. Since it is a source-based distro, I also am not trapped by RPM's or other packages no longer getting provided for my system. One of the applications I had was using RH9 with paid support only to have them drop maintenance on it and have the vender drag their feet moving to another platform clue stick, they had issues with the 2.

The enterprise editions? Forget about it You want to live in the suck, you try keeping one of those boxes alive and secure years after it EOL. Comment removed based on user account deletion. Re:Some serious crack smoking You are essentially describing a Slackware system after 20 minutes of install. It's just not trendy to knock on Slackware, so everyone targets Gentoo.

I've used gentoo for various purposes server, desktop, laptop. I personally don't think Gentoo is the best server OS out there From what I have heard, it does mean that. Not updating a Gentoy box for half a year or even longer often means that any attempt to upgrade it will be hard and painful. Part of "article" not quite correct.

There is no 'stable' version of Gentoo. Gentoo is rather a moving target where emerge will forever cause your system to approach the cutting edge. Not quite. If you don't have it set, you get "stable" packages.

If you do have it set, you get the unstable stuff. Haven't read the rest yet, but wanted to point that out. You're guaranteed to run into problems if you do that. By referring to there being "no 'stable' version of Gentoo", the author was not talking about having stable packages, but having stable package versions. This is a large part of where the disagreement between Mozilla and Debian stems: Debian wants to keep packages at the same version for years at a time, Mozilla wants every.

Not for me! Score: 5 , Funny. I certainly wouldn't want a Gentoo on my servers. Sure, it wouldn't weigh [wikipedia. I had a colo box that ran gentoo. Then one day, a standard stable package update broke mysql [alexvalentine. Assuming that the format was changed, and not just the db dir location.

It's probably because you went from 3. A major mysql update should certainly not be done without planning. However, the OP's point was that a standard stabe update included a major mysql upgrade which broke his functionality.

If that's indeed the case, there is something very wrong with the way Gentoo manages its packages, and exactly why you wouldn't want it running on any kind of production system. See, this is where things are slightly different with Gentoo versus any other Linux distribution.

There's no such thing as "Gentoo Version 3" or whatever. A package is marked stable after it is deemed to be Gentoo does have a mechanism whereby you can ask it to tell you what it proposes to update before it actually goes away and does it emerge -p , and on any system this is exactly what you should use to make sure you're not trying to do a major update on your database.

The one issue here. There's a reason that Debian is widely considered the best server OS despite being rather far behind the bleeding edge. Tried and tested is better than the latest and greatest when you rely on the machine being up. It's also worth noting that the military doesn't use any COTS technology within 5 years of it being released.

The Problem With Gentoo Gentoo is only good for ricers, Gentoo is bleeding edge and unstable, Gentoo is only good for X deployment The truth about Gentoo is that it is not really a distribution. Re:The Problem With Gentoo This whole argument is trivially debunked Score: 3 , Insightful.

The whole argument of "Gentoo 'wants' you to update a lot of things" is trivially debunked. Gentoo isn't a distro per se, it is a meta-distribution. I have worked in environments where Gentoo was used on servers, desktops, and what have you. The "solution" to Gentoo's frequent changes is simple: maintain your own portage tree mirror, which you keep frozen until you are good and ready to roll out the next major update which of course you only do after extensive testing, like any Suse, Red Hat, or debian.

The author writes this: A profile update will touch a very large number of configuration files, and it may even alter your startup process. Read the rest of this comment Gentoo's portage was modeled after BSD ports.

The similarities are intentional :D. FreeBSD vs. Re:some truth, but for many Gentoo is appropriate Score: 4 , Interesting. You wrote, "First of all, I find it interesting that FreeBSD never seems to get these complaints and hate about having to recompile packages with portupgrade all the time, and being able to tweak the flags, etc.

In this respect, it's just like gentoo!!!. There is a lot to like about gentoo but the final point that you acknowledge, "Gentoo takes more time to keep running," is extremely important, and worth elaborating on in a whole paragraph of its own. That is the core frustration of every negative gentoo review that I've read. The most common counter-argument to those complaints boils down to, "You just haven't spent enough time to appreciate the elegant beauty that is gentoo.

Once upon a time, I took the time to fully appreciate the beauty that is emacs. I accepted the truism that emacs doesn't meet you halfway, that you have to go to emacs; I read books on the subject; I made it my default editor; I created a highly customized. Eventually I just stopped using emacs.

I think of gentoo as the "emacs" of operating systems - really cool, but with a high pain threshold before the cool starts paying for itself.

Having run both FreeBSD and Gentoo systems, I think you're missing the obvious reason for why people are more satisified with FreeBSD: it is precisely because it doesn't have: "slots and masking and multiple supported versions". Okay, wait. It does have multiple supported versions, although rarely.

With FreeBSD, everyone is running, debugging, and fixing the same stuff. While stable may not be particularly bleeding-edge, it is still very dynamic, which is the point of the author's grief. It's even worse than that. Incidentally, I've run Gentoo for years on laptops, servers, you name it. I switched to Ubuntu about a year ago for desktops, but still use Gentoo on a server.

What I like about Ubuntu in particular is that every six months you can pretty much EXPECT all your packages, for the most part, to be updated to the most current stable versions. With Gentoo it's so much more haphazard. Yeah, Linux itself is haphazard With Gentoo, however, you're tied to the maintainer of th. Re: Score: 2 , Informative. Score: 3 , Funny. You've got to be kidding me Having not even read the article Score: 2. My post to the gentoo forums Score: 5 , Informative.

I posted this on the gentoo forums If someone is running a server room with many live production systems where downtime must be in seconds per year, they should ALWAYS have a test environment and a production environment.

Gentoo makes it extremely easy to produce this setup. Imagine if you will, this setup: 1 Master rsync system contains the portage sync used by all the systems 2 Test boxes for each role needed perhaps you have 3 different kinds of servers, WWW, Mail, DB 3 Many production boxes What you would end up doing is creating a fairly generic gentoo install by generic, I mean hardware independent - like i or whatever you feel comfortable that will be supported for the lifecycle of the servers.

All production servers are identical to the test boxes at the beginning of this example and have a simple backup of the whole test environments perhaps a large tarball saved on a separate drive. A new update is necessary for apache so you do an emerge --sync on the master rsync system. Then you rsync all the test boxes so they have the same portage tree. You then run the necessary installs on the test systems to make sure that it works, if it doesn't, then you research why and figure out if its easier to fix after the update, or if the update needs to be done differently, if you need to, you can restore the test system from the backup and start over.

After you have all the test boxes running well, you can then rsync the production boxes and reproduce the steps necessary to get them updated. Once all this is said and done, the production boxes will all be updated successfully and the updates were tested on the test boxes and the test boxes will at this point have the same configuration as the production boxes.

You would make a new backup of the test boxes and wait for the next time you have to do this cycle. As long as the boxes really are identical, you could even run konsole or another xterm that allows you to send your input to multiple console windows and perform the identical steps on all the same type of boxes sending your update commands to 20 or even 50 servers at once.

I'm sorry, but in any real production environment, I see NO issues with this setup. It may be a bit time consuming if you have a lot of etc-updates to do, but still, the basic update should be painless to that point. Lack of support contract considered harmful Score: 4 , Interesting. For a true production server where downtime costs thousands or millions of dollars a minute, you need the insurance of having people to escalate to if you have a problem.

That's the real reason not to run your production on Gentoo though the technical problem mentioned is probably what's kept anyone serious from selling a support contract for it. Nonsense Score: 5 , Insightful.

You say Gentoo wants to change a lot of stuff? Any binary distribution has two modes of updates. One is an updated package within the same release; the other is a mass-update from one release to another. Gentoo combines the two, since the distinction is artificial. What you call "changing a lot of stuff" is merely keeping packages reasonably current so that you never have to do a mass-update or complete reinstall.

Anyone who considers the Gentoo update process too difficult either hasn't used Gentoo upgrades are easy, and there aren't that many of them if you stick to stable x86 or has never dealt with package conflicts in binary distributions. That is the real horror I want to avoid, and I avoid it nicely by running Gentoo.

Updating Score: 3 , Insightful. It does NOT force you to do anything. This past year there have been some major changes in the Linux world like: glibc, gcc, xorg, apache Gentoo went to the standard and mysql are some the things I can think off of the top of my head. Because of how Gentoo updates, big updates like these might break things if your not watching what your doing. And if your blindly updating your system and overwriting confings when you do etc-update, its your own damm fault.

There comes a point in where a package is marked 'stable' for some distros, but if you look on the project site, its old and outdated. Anyway, it's been said [meyerweb. My gentoo server Score: 4 , Funny. Updating daily. From my point of view, Siker is just a moron and I mean it seriously. Cannot say I disagree. It's been said before by many. I cannot say I disagree with the article.

With more traditional distributions of Linux, you always have standardized packages with some amount of quality control. Bugs and security holes slip through to the end users all the time.

Often your end users report these bugs to the upstream maintainer. Occasionally, the end user even submits fixes upstream. Gentoo is so system dependent compared to other distros. Given 'n' amount of users with differing hardware and compile time arguments. The Qaulity Assurance ends at the user, always. You ultimately have a quality control department that consists of one, the user. Any system upgrade or maintenance procedures in production environments are usually limited to a few hours at most.

It does not make sense to spend six hours compiling what could have been installed, configured, and tested in 6 minutes with a pre-compiled package. In the event of a hardware failure, I find it reassuring when a Linux distro can be loaded onto a spare box in 15 minutes. Then spend a few more minutes restoring configurations from a good backup. But that's just my opinion. To each his own. If it works for you, then go with it. Otherwise, I'd say it is a fairly level-headed review. You realise that portage supports binary packages, right?

Compile-Time Score: 2. I haven't RTFA, but, yeah, compiling all of your software from scratch in a production environment every time you want to upgrade? That's ok. I'll pass. Not anymore. Gentoo on a server? No longer. I used Gentoo for several years. I learned an awful lot about Linux from it. And I appreciate the work that goes into it. But my servers run Debian now, for one reason - quick, reliable updates.

I support several small businesses, I don't have the resources to maintain test environnments to check the impact of upgrades. And not having multiple powerful systems at many sites means distcc is not an option. And the recompiles occasionally necessary for apache or samba or postfix or mysql put an unreasonable strain on servers that are typically not high powered and are supporting multiple users.

So for quick, reliable system updating apt-get beats emerge every time. I'm not knocking gentoo. It's a great system for testing stuff, and evaluating software. But in the 3 minutes it took me to type this post, I could update 5 servers that hadn't been updated in a week.

Never updating a server? Score: 3 , Insightful.