Debian <> Gentoo

[trilarian]

I have been a die-hard Debian fan for many years now, so even the thought of trying another distro outside of a LiveCD on a non-Linux system seems a bit odd. However, I have kept in touch with some friends from my college days that I introduced to Linux and eventually convinced to the Debian distro. Many of these guys have now moved to Gentoo and keep suggesting I give it a whirl. From them, they tell me it is basically Debian that compiles source instead of installing binaries - an advantage for speed.

So my questions are directed to preferably people who have used both Gentoo and Debian, but if you have an opinion and use either - feel free.

- Have you seen a noticeable difference in speed from Debian to Gentoo with the major programs compiled from source on Debian? Example, I have things like Enlightenment, Mozilla, etc. compiled even though I have a pre-compiled deb as an option.

- How similar/different is emerge to apt-get, dselect, aptitude, etc.?

- Does Gentoo have different levels of release (stable, testing, unstable)? When I looked at their main site, I saw stable and unstable, but didn't see a middle ground.

- When using emerge, does it compile all packages by default, or does it work similar to Debian's deb: and deb-src:?

Thanks for any input. I don't think I'll be changing my servers from Debian to Gentoo regardless of the impression I get when I give it a try. There is simply too much time invested in learning every detail I need to keep them up and running securely(not to mention Debian has not done any wrong to me, I'm just curious). However, for my main desktop I do like to play with new things from time to time, just for the pleasure of tinkering.

[je_fro]

I haven't noticed any speed increase, but I really like portage for its USE flag feature...
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handboo...?part=2&chap=1
Basically you edit /etc/make.conf and set USE so that at compile time the various --enable-foo and --disable-bar flags are passed to ./configure.
Portage is most similar to apt-get, it just takes a lot longer.
For stable/unstable you'll edit the KEYWORDS variable in make.conf, or you can set it for individual packages. ~ARCH is unstable and ARCH is stable. (ARCH might be ~alpha or sparc or ~amd64 or x86...)

- When using emerge, does it compile all packages by default, or does it work similar to Debian's deb: and deb-src:?

Emerge will resolve dependencies and compile all programs just like apt.

[trilarian]

Thanks for the info. One line that concerned me is:

However, a big warning applies: Portage will not check if the package you want to remove is required by another package. It will however warn you when you want to remove an important package that breaks your system if you unmerge it.

With apt-get, it will also select packages that are affected by the remove. So, for example, I want to remove package A which is a dependancy for package B and C. When I run:

apt-get remove A

I will get a message along the lines of:

The following packages will be REMOVED:
A B C
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

Does emerge just blindly remove programs without doing dependancy checks?

[je_fro]

Yes, emerge will remove whatever you tell it to remove. There are, however, nice tools like "eselect depends A" and "revdep-rebuild" that you can use to make informed decisions and effect repairs, respectively.

[trilarian]

Cool thanks. This looks to be a fun weekend project. Though with being content with Debian already, not sure if the distro will get past the project phase into regular use. Either way, at least I can then say I tried it and have an informed opinion.

[mrBen]

The big question is "what are you looking for from a distro?"

Contrary to popular myth, Gentoo won't make things blisteringly fast on any machine. The main reason, I believe, for using it is if you're interested in the inner workings of Linux, and like tweaking, but don't want to go all the way with LFS.

[AliasXZ]

That's exactly the reason why i use gentoo, you learn loads!

[geek.arnuld]

I have been a die-hard Debian fan for many years now, so even the thought of trying another distro outside of a LiveCD on a non-Linux system seems a bit odd. However, I have kept in touch with some friends from my college days that I introduced to Linux and eventually convinced to the Debian distro. Many of these guys have now moved to Gentoo and keep suggesting I give it a whirl. From them, they tell me it is basically Debian that compiles source instead of installing binaries - an advantage for speed.

IMVHO, i think, your friends misunderstood Gentoo. Gentoo is more about customisation than optimisation.

So my questions are directed to preferably people who have used both Gentoo and Debian, but if you have an opinion and use either - feel free.

- Have you seen a noticeable difference in speed from Debian to Gentoo with the major programs compiled from source on Debian? Example, I have things like Enlightenment, Mozilla, etc. compiled even though I have a pre-compiled deb as an option.

NO... i run Gentoo 2007.0 x86 and i have used AMD64 earlier. Firefox start and response times are faster on Debian Lenny/Sid. other things are just same but i will say Debian is little faster at other occasions as compared to Gentoo.

- How similar/different is emerge to apt-get, dselect, aptitude, etc.?

quite similar except that commands are different ;-) but i think apt-get is much of a mature tool as compared to emerge.
[/quote]

- Does Gentoo have different levels of release (stable, testing, unstable)? When I looked at their main site, I saw stable and unstable, but didn't see a middle ground.

don't know about that but with packages: packages are either available or masked(means unstable, but sometimes they work :-).

- When using emerge, does it compile all packages by default, or does it work similar to Debian's deb: and deb-src:?

never used "deb-src" on my Debian Lenny. emerge compiles everything from source and resolves dependencies automatically. it is an excellent tool IMO.

Thanks for any input. I don't think I'll be changing my servers from Debian to Gentoo regardless of the impression I get when I give it a try. There is simply too much time invested in learning every detail I need to keep them up and running securely(not to mention Debian has not done any wrong to me, I'm just curious). However, for my main desktop I do like to play with new things from time to time, just for the pleasure of tinkering.

keep your servers on Debian or BSDs. Gentoo is for people who want to customise/tweak their OS or who want to make "their-distro". as i said Gentoo is about extreme-customisation/configuartion. i am not a big fan of customisation or performance. i use Gentoo because it teaches me the *NIX internals and does not hide anything behind GUIs.

[trilarian]

Thanks guys - I appreciate the comments. The reason I kept throwing out the qualifier that I'm content with Debian, is simply that I wanted to make it clear I am already more than satisfied with Debian's performance, so am not looking for a better distro by researching Gentoo, simply I wanted to know what to expect to get a general idea if my time would be worth spending digging any deeper.

I find some people fall in love with a distro for strange reasons - some as odd as they like the way the symbol looks for the distro - and then everything else seems better on that distro with no real testing done(my friend would fall in here haha). So I wanted to approach a more professional community and see the thoughts. It appears Gentoo is at least worthy of tinkering with on a spare box to get my personal opinions of. Tweaking everything is fun to me on a personal desktop, however on a server or work box(where I don't have much time to tinker), I would prefer knowing I could grab some pre-configured files to start with and just make changes as they are needed.