Turning to Gentoo

I like Slackware. When I was a total newbie, someone suggested SUSE, but after a little while, when I wanted to know what was going on ‘under the hood’, it got complicated. Back then, Yast was ok, probably not as comprehensive as today. I tried Slackware, and liked its simplicity, and clean-ness. It didn’t provide lots of packages installed by default, that I had little idea of. Quite often the packages I did want weren’t provided as Slackware packages at all. But that was OK – this more ‘zen’ Linux made under the hood a way of life. What is the sound of one automounter daemon clapping?

The cost of Slackware was – you needed to know how things worked. If you must have fancy removable drive recognition, start reading those fine manuals. For servers, Slackware with it’s minimal approach, and intelligent audience, the match is close to perfect.

But eventually, where I was, living on the desktop, configuring video drivers, other niceties (plus cool toys, spinning cubes) called out. I turned to Gentoo.

It was partly the building from source that I was familiar with, the speed, the flexibility that got my attention. And a civilized package management system. I am happy with it, that I still have text files to configure, with the breadth of packages offered, and depth of the community.

And the last word with Linux is, of course, the choice is yours.