I’ve been messing with Gentoo in the past few days, and the OS is quite a piece of work, but it’s probably not for me.

To preface it, the Gentoo install is not difficult, it just takes more time and effort than most installs. In order to be familiar with the process (and, OK… i messed up a few times), i installed twice. The Gentoo install guide may seem quite daunting at first, and your printer won’t like belching out 86 pages; as an intermediate user, the install wasn’t too hard, and about half the guide was on alternate methods, and very thorough annotations. Simply put, this is the best guide i’ve ever seen.

Once you’ve installed [and have networking, for that matter], installing X and a desktop environment (mine is Gnome) is the ten-thousand pound gorilla. Building X took about and hour and fifteen minutes, and i don’t know how long Gnome took, i just left it on over the night.

When i woke up in the morning, i was horrified to find that Gnome was at version 2.10, and X and 6.8.2! While i knew that Gentoo was a bleeding-edge distro, i had failed to read on how to make it bleeding edge. Pretty much, you have to ‘unmask’ packages that are normally hidden from the user, due to not being stable yet.

I decided to stick with Fluxbox for a while, because i wanted to learn it, and because it only took a few minutes to compile. It took quite a long time to find how to unmask packages, and during that time i figured out that Fluxbox is not very Fitt’s Law complient – No Ben for you! Fitt’s law is a really big deal for me.

During the night, i recompiled Gnome, assured that in the morning, it would be 2.12. I woke up this morning, and Gnome was 2.12. Gnome would not start. Gnome complained that gnome-settings-daemon couldn’t load – a correct assumption, because gnome-settings-daemon wasn’t anywhere on the system!

I’ve decided to take a break from Gentoo, until i have two systems, and won’t go crazy when one my only computer isn’t in full working order. While Gentoo is an awesome project, it still suffers from package instability (in a few things, gnome was the biggest) once you venture off the Stable portage tree.

I hate to hear myself admit it, but i have the best! I have a stable, fast, easy to maintain, Fitt’s Law complient, and up-to-date system that took less than an our to set up. Ubuntu deserves it’s high ranking on the Distrowatch page-hit rankings for a simple reason – it’s easy to use, without being a big, bulky resource hog. Not many distros can truthfully answer to that reason.