[Tfug] Tweet from Michael Foord (@voidspace)

[Joe Roberts]

I've been using Gentoo on my desktop almost exclusively since 2002 and
I don't think of it as a particularly broken or unstable distribution.

What does sometimes happen is things break *really badly* in Gentoo,
when they do tank, which is fairly rare.  I went through this last
week.

One thing that is making life complicated in Gentoo is that KDE4
remains unstable.  Increasingly this is relying on unstable packages
outside of KDE4, which sometimes makes things difficult and
unpleasant.

The nature of Gentoo is it encourages users to tinker, sometimes maybe
with things they shouldn't be tinkering with (well, this is my problem
anyway).  It makes you really comfortable screwing around with
compilers and their switches, different library versions, and so on.
You can very easily hose your system this way.

Obviously those who are Linux geniuses don't have this problem as often.

Overall, after 7 years of Gentoo, I'm only ever inclined to switch
when I run into some horrible dependency problem and I ask myself how
much I really care about rolling upgrades and having the latest and
greatest version of something, which is rare.

Ordinarily I don't think about it too much.

On 10/3/09, Linux Media <linuxmedia2 at aim.com> wrote:
> Chris Merle wrote:
>> http://twitter.com/voidspace/status/4549676755
>>
>> "I guess it's true - Linux is for people who don't mind things being
>> broken, Gentoo is for people who *want* them to be broken."
>> - Michael Foord (@voidspace)
>>
>> Saw this tweet this morning and thought I'd share/stir the pot and see
>> whether y'all agree/disagee/etc.
>>
>> Chris
>> ----
>> (sent via mobile)
>
> Hi,
>
> About five years ago I used SuSE. And even back then it was as easy to
> use as Windows. In fact, I sold my computer (with SuSE) to some woman
> next door who didn't know a lot about computers. I showed her how to do
> certain things, like Instant Messaging, web surfing, email and the usual
> stuff people used their computers for. And for the most part, she took
> what she learned and ran with it.
>
> Rocco
>
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