Linux woes
This summer I installed Gentoo. I learned a whooooole lot about Linux by doing that, because you have to install everything you need (like, say, the program that starts graphical applications instead of a command line). Except I have had a lot of Gentoo woes on my laptop, mostly due to wireless issues. Last night was the real deal-breaker for it: I was at Chris's apartment, where the wireless makes you log in using a Javascript-capable browser before it would work. Gentoo broke linking somewhere, and suddenly all of my graphical browsers stopped working. This of course meant that I lost my Internet connection and could not get it back. I went back to campus today (where the wireless has no such requirements) to try to fix it, but I still couldn't find out what was wrong. I did manage to download a binary version of Firefox so that I could grab some Internets, but that's not really satisfying, since a lot of things, like my backup web browser, or my PDF reader, still won't compile, much less run. Gentoo doesn't provide binary packages for anything, so I'm stuck. It doesn't help that Gentoo's user support seems to consist mostly of their devs saying things like "Oh, you didn't try [insert really obscure thing most end-users have never heard of here]? Well, why not? Don't ask for help until you have tried [insert several things that no documentation except bug reports ever tells you to do]."
The end result of this is that I am switching to Sabayon, which is Gentoo but working out of the box and with binaries of all packages. Which kind of makes it not like Gentoo at all, except that their binaries are pulled off the unstable version of Gentoo's source-package tree, and you can use portage if you want to. It helps that their documentation does not assume vast amounts of Linux knowledge. This is not true of the Gentoo documentation, which assumes you can do things that I still can't do even after setting up a whole system from scratch.
Anyway, I was making a point, which is that while Gentoo is great and Portage is a fantastic package manager when it works, when it breaks you have only the elitists to turn to, and you might need a second computer to get the first one working again. That's not really cool, so I'm switching distros.
The end result of this is that I am switching to Sabayon, which is Gentoo but working out of the box and with binaries of all packages. Which kind of makes it not like Gentoo at all, except that their binaries are pulled off the unstable version of Gentoo's source-package tree, and you can use portage if you want to. It helps that their documentation does not assume vast amounts of Linux knowledge. This is not true of the Gentoo documentation, which assumes you can do things that I still can't do even after setting up a whole system from scratch.
Anyway, I was making a point, which is that while Gentoo is great and Portage is a fantastic package manager when it works, when it breaks you have only the elitists to turn to, and you might need a second computer to get the first one working again. That's not really cool, so I'm switching distros.