I think we were both using Gentoo at the time, which probably qualifies as "oddball" I guess
More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded. But you have my sympathies and condolences for the hours you lost to Gentoo.
And never let it be said that Gentoo has good package management. Clever, perhaps. But not good. Good package management requires good packaging policies, good maintainers, and good technology. The software involved is only a small part of the picture, and while one could possibly convince me that portage is a reasonably good piece of software, the other two pieces of the equation simply aren't there for Gentoo. And, because the policies of Gentoo are actively hostile to stability and predictability, even if the project does gain enough good maintainers, it will never be a suitable operating system for servers, or any system that you don't want to reinstall every couple of months (unless, of course, their policies change...at which point, the reasons people are so excited about Gentoo will have evaporated and all that will remain is Yet Another Linux Distribution).
"More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded."
I think that's a little harsh. I still use it on a server or 2, it's got some very nice organisation not seen in ubuntu or others. Also having it compile everything should give performance gains.
I still use it on a server or 2, it's got some very nice organisation not seen in ubuntu or others.
Sure, it's nifty to play with. But, it's the basic philosophy of Gentoo that is broken (for anything other than a tinkerers OS). Nothing can be predicted in a Gentoo system, and no Gentoo system is the same as any other. Lots of fun, and infinitely customizable. But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value.
I'll happily concede that portage has done wonders with a rather complex problem...allowing custom on-the-spot builds of everything, and being able to upgrade and install most of the time without resulting in a flaming pile of wreckage. As long as the philosophy is "anything you want, even stuff that has practically zero testing, and all built from scratch while you wait", Gentoo will remain unpredictable and unreliable, and occasionally insane.
Every package and option that Gentoo provides is a new variable...something new that can go wrong. You cannot test that many variables, no matter how smart you are. And, of course, I don't think the Gentoo developers are particularly smarter than the folks behind Debian or RHEL or Ubuntu, though they may be as smart...but to be as successful with their chosen philosophy they have to be significantly smarter and significantly more numerous, because they have to solve far harder problems and on a scale never before seen. A very basic grasp of combinatorial mathematics tells me that Gentoo will have several orders of magnitude more possible failure paths than RHEL or Debian.
Anyway, if you opt to stick with an entirely stock install of Gentoo (by some definition of "stock") you will get a system that has as few variables as RHEL or CentOS or Debian or Ubuntu, which is a win. But, you lose the things that make Gentoo unique (and exciting for some folks)...and you get a system that is tested by a tiny fraction as many people as have tested RHEL, CentOS, Debian, or Ubuntu. Not only is the userbase dramatically smaller, it's also fractured into thousands of unique distros, because so few people are running a "default" Gentoo.
What always amazes me is that the Gentoo developers don't realize what a mess they've signed up for with the choices they've made. They do have some awesome documentation, though. That may be a side effect of a system that is so vaguely defined...anyone that wants to accomplish anything with it has to read a lot and know a lot, so a lot of docs get written. I dunno.
"But, in a server, you need to know where you stand--and being able to experiment has far less value."
That's an amazing sweeping generalization. I'd say if you're trying for some highly optimized custom setup, gentoo is precisely the right distro to choose on a server.
I do agree though with some of your points. Ubuntu is certainly a lot less hassle than gentoo to maintain/setup, and deploying things on Ubuntu is easier since it's a pretty much known state...
More than oddball...Gentoo is just plain retarded. But you have my sympathies and condolences for the hours you lost to Gentoo.
And never let it be said that Gentoo has good package management. Clever, perhaps. But not good. Good package management requires good packaging policies, good maintainers, and good technology. The software involved is only a small part of the picture, and while one could possibly convince me that portage is a reasonably good piece of software, the other two pieces of the equation simply aren't there for Gentoo. And, because the policies of Gentoo are actively hostile to stability and predictability, even if the project does gain enough good maintainers, it will never be a suitable operating system for servers, or any system that you don't want to reinstall every couple of months (unless, of course, their policies change...at which point, the reasons people are so excited about Gentoo will have evaporated and all that will remain is Yet Another Linux Distribution).