Many of the critics of Gentoo are quite critical of Gentoo users who attempt to make the transition from the traditional role of a user to the role of a System Administrator (with varying degrees of success), and of users who are new to UNIX-like systems. Many of these users have difficulty understanding the jargon and reasoning for proper system provisioning, tuning and maintenance. Some of these users may have been dissuaded from pursuing other, more "technical" distributions due to harsh treatment of newbie users by members of the other distributions' user community, but still desired to learn more about the infrastructure of a Linux installation and found a more welcoming environment in Gentoo's extensive, respectful and newbie-friendly user base, well-maintained documentation and forums. However, some of these users are also attracted to Gentoo because they've heard, rightly or wrongly, that Gentoo is the "best" or most "elite" distribution to use.Chubby wrote:How about SuSE en Mandrake??Anonymous wrote:I don't see any advangtes that gentoo has that debian doesn't have?
I prefer SuSE above Mandrake, but god knows why
Some typical criticisms include:
* Dizzying array of USE flags, causing new users to create highly broken systems
* Endless gcc CFLAG tweaking creates systems that are slower than expected
* Lack of understanding of gcc and its options cause hard-to-find issues in new users' systems
* Lack of understanding of Linux Kernel building causes hard-to-find issues in new users' systems
* New users not taking care to read FAQ's, search the Gentoo forums, read the documentation, misusing terminology, etc...
Two of the best examples of criticisms leveled at Gentoo users are the angry satire of newbie Gentoo users Gentoo Is Rice (http://funroll-loops.org/) and the "Root Cause"-seeking Mandrake Expatriate Syndrome
Gentoo is sometimes criticized for poor QA (though this is a possibly unavoidable consequence of focusing on having more "up-to-date" versions of software available), unstable "stable" branches and for having a closed "upper management elite". Much of the difficulties experienced in past years from the "stable" branch has dissipated due to the addition of a separate "unstable" branch, and will most likely continue to improve with time and effort. However, Gentoo, having a "bleeding-edge" repository of software, often relies on "upstream" (i.e. original authors) QA process. This works well for highly-used software (such as Apache), but less so for little-used software. Gentoo is also criticised for its long installation process, sometimes taking days on older hardware. One of the other interesting debates commonly held is the binary versus source packaging, Gentoo using the latter by default. Source packagers claim that binaries are slow, while binary packagers refute that some packages take days to compile; they want the program now. Of course, both have their own advantages and disadvantages. In response to this criticism, Gentoo offers precompiled binaries for various architectures of popular applications including KDE, GNOME, Open Office and Mozilla, and all the packages required to run them. These sets of packages are referred to as the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP) and are updated with every new release of Gentoo. Finally, the closed "upper management elite" atmosphere has dissipated since Daniel Robbins formed the Not For Profit (NFP) organization known as the Gentoo Foundation.
Most, if not all, of these criticisms are hotly debated between a vocal minority of users of community-based Linux Distributions.
