Scatterism

I’m a source fanatic, I like compiling everything from scratch, squeeze every last drop of performance, GCC has tons of tweaks a person can use, architecture-specific optimizations, loops unrolling, math extras and many many other features. What’s good about compiling is that you get to always link against the latest libraries the system has, you can static-link, dynamic-link, build partial packages, complete binaries, pack up a full-fledged application server in a just a few megabytes… things you won’t find in any pre-compiled packages

Not to mention, I also have some bad memories with RPM, you always have to find something that’s compiled against your version of libraries, or something evil might happen, like you might have to recompile!

To make a short story long, I got fed up with all this, I started playing with other Linux distros, starting with RedHat-like Fedora, Debian, Slackware, even LFS. Now don’t get me wrong, I like all of them, they’re sweet, give a lot of flexibility, and even better, they’re maintained. But like I said before, I’m a source fanatic, they just didn’t cut it out for me.

Tried FreeBSD, no really, FreeBSD just makes sense, it doesn’t have that “patched-up” feeling, it’s consistent, has a huge fan base, and it’s package management is just a miracle in software distribution history, you can start compiling a kernel on a production server while you’re half asleep, upgrading software makes wonders, it knows all the ins and outs of all the packages in the ports collection, it’s a walk in a park if compared to other software distribution methods used in Linux. With FreeBSD, you feel you’re always (well almost always) on the safe side, it doesn’t have the thrill of running a bleeding-edge-run-from-scratch Linux system, that’s all good, except not good enough for a person who loves to mess up his system once in a while.

That’s when I stumbled upon Gentoo Linux. To be honest, I didn’t buy it at first, I’ve already seen source-based distros miserably fail, and I though that Gentoo shouldn’t be an exception. Yes, some of them might be really good for educational purposes (read LFS), but they can’t easily become major desktop/server distributions, they take a lot of time and work to get things running, and upgrading is usually a nightmare. Gentoo’s philosophy was different, very different.

Gentoo is mainly about choice, they put all the power you need within your fingers, and they give you tools to make use of this power. You still get to tweak the system to your heart’s content, you still get to run whatever applications you need, and you even have a choice of compiling (in case of boredom) or installing precompiled binaries (in case of extreme laziness). Gentoo doesn’t slaughter Apache’s guts in order to install it (unlike RedHat), it’s package installation is more like the casual ./configure && make && make install, more or less. Gentoo can automatically recognize package dependencies, optional dependencies and automatically upgrade (and recompile if needed) the system in a breeze.

No that’s not it, it boots from UltraSPARC-II, to me that’s already something. Why? Because of the whole night spent in getting FreeBSD to run (or at least boot) on a Sun UltraSPARC-II, it doesn’t boot from CD, it cannot boot from a floppy disk, obviously I can’t make use of the x86 ISO images (just kidding). FreeBSD can only netboot on UltraSPARC-II, and you can imagine the task of setting up a server than can give it a hand.

In a nutshell, I booted Gentoo, ifconfig‘ed eth0, bootstrapped to the Linux 2.6.5, waited a couple of hours until X, KDE and Gnome are done compiling, and viola! My system’s is up and running, no complications whatsoever, no RPM hair-pulling sessions, no nothing, just a solid system running double as fast as Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, <insert-name-here>… Yes, I finally found my favorite distro, I can go and brag about it all I want… and “experts” say Linux has no future in desktop! Linux has all the future it needs to suite the needs of newbies, just as well as gurus.

Disclaimer: This is NOT a rant against FreeBSD, I love FreeBSD, it makes a very stable, rock-solid server and desktop platform, I don’t even consider any other system when it comes to stability (but that’s another story), only choosing Gentoo over FreeBSD has more to do with my “taste” rather than my technical backgrounds. If you haven’t yet experienced the pleasure of having a system that serves your exact needs, not the major market share’s, just go ahead and try Gentoo, you won’t regret it.