Current Gentoo user

[Miguel Lopes Santos Ramos]

> From: Grant <emailgrant at gmail.com>
> Subject: Current Gentoo user
>
> It has recently come to my attention that FreeBSD is "similar" to
> Gentoo Linux.  I've been a Gentoo user for about 5 years and I love
> the concept, but it feels like the project is slowing down.  I like to
> learn/use/know one OS for server, media system, laptop, router, etc.
> How would you compare the two OSes?
>
> - Grant

I only have the time to give you a very general impression.
I use FreeBSD at home since at least 1995, I deployed Gentoo at my current
employment because people were less afraid of it than of FreeBSD.
For me, Gentoo is the next best thing to FreeBSD...

I don't know, but I guess that Gentoo portage was heavily inspired by FreeBSD
ports, in that with one command you fetch the source, apply patches, compile and install.

Gentoo however, takes the concept much further in that everything you have on
your system is a port, so portage really controls everything. Even when you
install a stage-3 tarball, all files are also registered with portage.

On FreeBSD, the ports collection is only used for addons to the base system; the
base system could be compared to a stage-3 tarball except that it is much more
complete (cron, syslog, dhclient, bind9, openssh, tcsh, nvi, ncurses, sendmail,
pam, opie, telnet, ftp, traceroute, to name a few are installed in the base system)
so you really can have an operational base system.
For instance, if you want to install a web server, perhaps the base system +
apache is enough, the same goes for database server.
Typically, the base system plus what is required for your application.
Not so with Gentoo.

Because such fundamental services such as cron, syslog, etc are on the base
system, most things also come much more configured than they do on Gentoo.
It is a lot more work to get things going on Gentoo.
Even so, FreeBSD is clean enough to fit in about 250MB.

Now, for server or router: in my opinion, FreeBSD is much easier to setup for
any server setup (of course, I've been using it for much longer). For router,
you don't need to add anything to the base system.
FreeBSD is much, much, much better documented than Gentoo, most common server
setups are covered in the handbook.
Gentoo's documentation is very nice, but still covers only a few loose topics. 
Most of the time you have to resort to disperse Linux documentation if you're
not a long time Linux geek.

For media/desktop system: FreeBSD is probably worse. It's a pain to get
google-earth working on FreeBSD, lots of Linux applications crash a lot. Even
FreeBSD natively compiled applications such as mplayer are hard to get properly
compiled.

On Gentoo it's quite safe to put CFLAGS=-O3 in make.conf, not on FreeBSD. The
USE flags framework work surprisingly well, there's ufed, revdep-rebuild, etc.
Not so much on FreeBSD, the older ports system is evolving slowly. The Gentoo
designers benefited from designing from scratch.
On the other hand, the ports collection on FreeBSD is much less likely to break
things than portage is. Try updating expat on Gentoo and everything will stop
working; on FreeBSD, the shared libraries are kept and everything keeps working.
Actually, the ports collection in itself seldom breaks anything. Portage does.

For laptop: I run FreeBSD amd64 on my laptop, everything works very well. And it
is a radeon card, 3D without hardware acceleration is surprisingly fast these days.
There's no hibernation. I don't know if you have that on Gentoo.

AMD64: Runs lots of 386 binaries unless they require a lot of i386 ports, which would
require you to install a i386 ports tree side by side with amd64; this isn't supported.
You can't get linux_dri on AMD64, so that locks google-earth out for me.


After two years using Gentoo, after the first very positive impression, I'm a
bit tired of breaking things due to updating one port.
It's also too much of a pain reconfiguring and recompiling the Linux kernel.
Perhaps it's my lack of experience.
On FreeBSD, you can compile the kernel every day with no trouble at all, even
the whole base system weekly, if you're so inclined. I can't be objective, but I
think in this respect FreeBSD is much, much, much better.

Greetings,

Miguel Ramos
Lisboa, Portugal