strangest systems I've sent email from

[alexmcwhirter at triadic.us]

On 2016-04-29 11:06, Todd Goodman wrote:
> * Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> [160429 09:44]:
> [..SNIP..]
>> Those are /really/ different. Gentoo is just putting low-profile tyres
>> and plastic spoilers on a boring little family car.
> 
> You fundamentally misunderstand Gentoo so it's not surprising you'd be
> so condescending towards it and the people using it.
> 
> Perhaps ten years ago when you looked you were in some "ricer" 
> community
> where they were promoting Gentoo as distro to use because you could
> easily tune your build parameters to wring out every last bit of
> performance.
> 
> But when I started with Gentoo over ten years ago I didn't end up in
> that community.
> 
> Gentoo is really a meta-distribution and used by other distributions
> (ever heard of Chrome OS?)
> 
> As has been discussed there are good reasons to build systems from
> source.  Being easy to patch yourself using your own patches or patches
> from others instantly is one.  Being able to rip out systemd if desired
> and use alternatives is hardly putting "low-profile tyres and plastic
> spoilers on a boring little family car."
> 
> You don't like it (nor any Linux/GNU system it seems if you consider
> them all "boring little family cars.")
> 
> OK fine.
> 
> But don't spread misinformation about it from some failed attempt of
> yours ten years ago.
> 
> Todd

I completely agree, gentoo has very little to do with tweaking compiler 
flags. In fact they advise fairly heavily against it. It's all about 
having the freedom of choice.

Gentoo is powerful because you get to chose your init system, kernel 
options, and every other piece of software that runs on the box. No 
matter how you configure it, it's most likely supported. You also don't 
have to pull in tons of packages to support features you don't need. For 
example, dovecot on ubuntu pulls in ldap, sasl, etc... On gentoo you 
choose what gets pulled in via USE flags.

CrossDev is also a great to that has helped me port gentoo to SPARC64 
with little to no issues. Patching packages is a breeze in portage as 
well. Not to mention that Catalyst makes building ISO's and stage3 
archive stupid easy.