So I’ve been running Gentoo Linux on my home machine for several months now, and other than one thing, I’m in love.The first thing is, why am I not in love with Gentoo? Here’s my answer: Ebuilds take too freaking long!!! OK, other than that, here’s why I like it.
- Konqueror is incredibly fast compared to Redhat 8 or 9
- Everything is incredibly fast compared to any other Linux distribution I’ve used.
- I can be doing an “emerge -u world” (which pretty much rebuilds my whole system if I need it), simultaneously with watching a movie under mplayer on a single-CPU system, and other than a couple of small hiccups in the DVD from time to time, everything works perfectly.
- When I run xmms, I never, ever have a skip on any ogg or mp3 playback. Considering that I’m in the process of ripping my entire CD collection, I’m amazed. I can be ripping, playing back, and simultaneously compiling Mozilla, and never drop a beat on playback. Occasionally the video may lag due to what a heavy load it is, but otherwise it’s amazing.
- Rock-solid stability. I’m running the Gentoo-optimized 2.4 kernel, with everything built with some pretty decent optimizations, and the only thing that has ever locked up my system was me trying to run some stupid 3D visualization when I was running xmms under real-time priority (ergo, as root, dumb dumb dumb). I chalk that one crash up to PEBKAC.
- Did I mention it was really fast? Neverwinter Nights plays a whole lot faster than it does under Windows. I mean, really, really noticeably faster.
- Comparing my 933MHz Pentium III at home running Gentoo to my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 at work, the Pentium 4 feels like a slow dog out of the gate. I’m thinking it’s time to upgrade to Gentoo at work, too.
What’s not to like? Well, the length of time it takes to emerge (that’s the command you run to install a software package) is one big thing keeping me from using it everywhere. As slow as it is installing KDE on my 933MHz Pentium III, I imagine it would be sheer torture on my 366MHz Sony Vaio laptop. Then again, just leave the laptop alone for a couple of days while I’m at work, and it should be finished.The other things are that sometimes there are things I just don’t know what I’m doing wrong. Like making USB work for my Palm Pilot, for instance. The devices don’t exist under /dev/usb. The really nice thing about Gentoo is dependency handling. For instance, I have both KDE 3.1.1 and KDE 3.1.2 installed side-by-side, and can easily swap between the two if I need to for some compatability reasons. And emerge makes it simple to clean up afterward.
I’ll write a more detailed review at some time in the future. For now, I need to go play some NWN.