Isolationism

I apologise for a quiet couple of days here on the blog; I’ve been busy doing a bit of maintenance on my desktops.

While I was eventually successful in upgrading Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft, I experienced frequent lock-ups for no good reason (while the machine was doing literally nothing more than playing music in Amarok). It goes without saying that if an OS can’t be trusted to play an mp3, I don’t want to depend on it for anything more important (which is just about everything).

While I haven’t given up on Ubuntu—I still think it’s a great idea to bring Linux into the hands of the masses—I have gone back to Gentoo on the desktop for a little while. I feel that especially in light of my earlier post, I should justify this decision with an explanation:

1. I already have a Gentoo desktop set up on another hard drive in the same machine—It is what I was running before I tried Ubuntu (which I am now grateful for having installed on a separate hard drive in the first place). It’s a bit out of date, but nothing an emerge world won’t fix; Since I’m recompiling most packages anyway, I took the opportunity to upgrade to gcc 4.
2. I like how Gentoo works, and I’m quite familiar with its layout, the pros and cons. Having to compile packages isn’t the fastest way to install stuff, but it works—and given my recent experiences with Ubuntu, I’ve rediscovered how refreshing it is to have control over what gets installed, and how it runs.
3. I’m already well-familiar with Gentoo’s layout and run it on other machines on the network here. Having a near-homogenous amd64 environment means being able to run distcc as well, making big compile jobs more bearable.
4. Gentoo runs faster for me than Ubuntu. No, not 3-5%, we’re talking several hundred percent faster for some operations, like … loading your average desktop software package. I’ve heard plenty of arguments that this kind of performance difference between Gentoo and other distros is utter horse-poop, and the effect is almost (if not completely) psycho-somatic. To anyone who believes this is the case, I invite you to pop by with a chronometer and time things for yourself. Incidentally, I’m not saying Gentoo is faster than every distribution. I’m not even saying Gentoo is faster than Ubuntu across the board; I’m just saying for me, Gentoo runs noticeably faster than Ubuntu, from someone who has used both quite a bit.
5. I feel more in control of the OS with Gentoo; In my mind it’s a bit like driving stanard compared to automatic. I’m not a ricer who thinks they’re getting massive horsepower out of compiling everything themselves, nor am I convinced I could rewrite Linux from the ground up because I’m so knowledgeable about it because I can “compile from source” (using an ebuild). The fact is, I feel totally at home rebuilding the kernel or compiling my own software in Gentoo, whether it’s to get the latest/greatest of something (like mplayer), or to install stuff that isn’t in the portage tree at all. It’s no surprise why, either—Every piece of userland software in Gentoo is there because I installed it, or because it’s a dependency for something else I installed, and the kernel is the way it is because I configured it that way. Ubuntu tries to be user-friendly, and it succeeds—but in a way that I feel separates (perhaps necessarily) the user from the OS itself in trying to present a clean, unintimidating environment. I may find Gentoo complex and occasionally annoying—but never intimidating.

Just like when I switched to Ubuntu in the first place, it’s still there on another hard drive, waiting to be revived. I’m going to give the Ubuntu folks a month or two to sort out the bugs and give it another whirl—I’m hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

Also, Windows XP has been bluescreening on a regular basis (once every 24 hours or so) for half a week, so I wiped it and reinstalled.