In http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=1, a request is made: "It is very important that you understand that choices are what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force you onto anything you don't like. If you feel like we do, please bugreport it." In the car mechanic analogy, people may wish they were more consistent in doing the following, but the freedom is freedom in forcedly learning to become a mechanic and then make tightly controlled mechanic's choices in souping-up the engine. The one choice that is not allowed is to just drive the car around without forcedly becoming a mechanic. There's the definition, "Ubuntu. An ancient African word meaning, 'Gentoo is too hard for me.'" And, speaking as someone who was first a Unix system administrator in the early '90s, I am finding that Ubuntu allows the one choice that is hard to find in Gentoo: "I don't want to play mechanic; just let me drive," my preference for Ubuntu in most cases is precisely what the definition says: Gentoo makes things needlessly hard. Or, if you prefer, Gentoo is too hard for me. Perhaps Gentoo could work on a "Push Here, Dummy" choice so that people could choose not to be a mechanic, or choose when to play mechanic, and ease in to being a mechanic to the degree wanted. Make being a mechanic a choice--perhaps a suggested choice, but give the freedom to not be a mechanic, or not be a mechanic all the time. Reproducible: Always
Interesting. Where do you think we go wrong? And did you try out Sabayon Linux (which is a sort of Gentoo Linux stripped of many choices)?
Let me rephrase that. In which respect do you want Gentoo to be (more) like Ubuntu? The goals of both projects are completely different and probably mostly incompatible. If you want an easy way to install Gentoo and then have a choice to divert from the beaten path that a "single click install" would give you, something like Sabayon Linux is the distro of your choice. Or you could use Ubuntu or Fedora and maintain your own patches and other changes for that distro. Generally, Gentoo Linux is built on [URL] with a tendency to please both UPSTREAM and DOWNSTREAM - i.e. give the user as many of the choices that UPSTREAM intended.
(In reply to comment #1) > Interesting. Where do you think we go wrong? And did you try out Sabayon Linux > (which is a sort of Gentoo Linux stripped of many choices)? > I haven't tried Sabayon Linux; I don't have an informed opinion about it. But let me make two basic points: Point one: At work, I migrated to Gentoo for a while and then migrated back to Ubuntu because of the amount of time I was spending related to updates and solving puzzles that occurred: my boss expects me to do most of my own system administration, but the amount of time I was spending on system administration puzzles, as opposed to handing in useful work, was significantly higher, and I get the impression from what I've seen that it would be a tall order (possibly AI-complete) to make a utility that would run from cron and keep a system up-to-date... and if it's hard enough that I'm having to spend a lot of time solving system administration puzzles, I'd be careful about how technical of a user I referred to it. Where I think you go wrong is that you understand freedom in terms of choices in souping up that you offer a mechanic, and not that the top exercise of freedom in using a car now is to get the keys and go driving. Which is a problem, not only for users who are not aspiring mechanics, but users who are somewhat of a mechanic but, even if they're curious about a car's insides, want a car for driving more than tinkering. Point two: There was one time I was with two friends, one a technical user and one nontechnical, and I pointed out that it used to be common, well before you could download and compile a package on your machine, for chips to each have their own instruction set optimized according to the perceived utility in their owner's priority. (I followed this remark by clarifying to the nontechnical user, "which is a bit like each book having its own alphabet.") The point I was trying to make was that even though it's possible and permitted to go off developing your own branch of an OSS project, it's usually not most users should want to do: and, I explained, several years before I began running Gentoo, the winning solution is not to have your own privately optimized instruction set for your computer, or an alphabet optimized for the needs of your essay or novel, etc. Gentoo does the route of providing a privately optimized instruction set much better than I could, but the "We'll equip you to optimize your own instruction set" route as done in Gentoo does not provide the option of saying "Please give me a good, standard chip from the following line."
This discussion might be more suited to a mailing list. However, should Gentoo really aim to be all things to all people? If somebody wants plug-and-play, wouldn't it be better to just use Ubuntu? I don't think Gentoo's goal is to conqueror the desktop. We don't want to become one of those elistist distros with 25 users total. However, I don't know that it has ever been the aim of Gentoo to be the most popular distro around. Since we're doing car analogies - Gentoo doesn't aim to be the most popular distro among the billions of drivers worldwide, but it does aim to be the most popular distro among the tens of millions of mechanics and car enthusiasts worldwide. In any case, the defaults are generally appropriate. If a user doesn't know how gcc works then gentoo probably is never going to be the right choice for them. However, if the user is at least studying to be a mechanic then it should be a good choice. :)
Thinking a bit... Maybe without changing Gentoo, the handbook should be changed. First, it could be clearer that, in Richard Freeman's adjustment, Gentoo isn't aiming to be the most popupar Linux distribution among six billion drivers, but is aiming to be the most popular Linux distribution among ten million mechanics (actual and would-be) and enthusiasts. The choice of "Just give me the keys and let me drive" is an obvious choice, so rather than stating without qualification that "It is very important that you understand that choices are what makes Gentoo run. We try not to force you onto anything you don't like. If you feel like we do, please bugreport it." (http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=1), it might be clearer to say, "Gentoo is by and for developers and enthusiasts who want and choose a large amount of control in fine-tuning their systems and want to know their systems well. It isn't really aiming at people who just want to easily use their computers and have their computers to work at a basic level, and it isn't the most novice-friendly on the net. However, if you want to know how your computer ticks and want fine-tuned control of a system optimized for your case, we believe Gentoo is a serious contender for your use..." Second, I did not find acknowledgment of a major issue that is worth addressing in the handbook. If you follow the strong recommendation, and try to keep your system updated, Gentoo will break down and will require significant know-how to get working. By not addressing the case where someone types "emerge --atuvD world" and Portage blocks and refuses to continue, you haven't hinted to the would-be Gentoo expert that this is normal, relatively unexceptional Portage behavior and not due to monumental stupidity on the fan's part. Second, and more deeply, this represents a missed opportunity to explain the usual bag of tricks that a good system administrator would use when something breaks. For example, the manual does not state that most problems with Gentoo have almost assuredly happened to someone else first, and therefore you stand good odds of getting some problems answered within minutes, or at least identifying which problems are truly hard, if you know how to find the most salient part of the error message, paste it into a Google search, and possibly add a small number of carefully chosen keywords so as to find a webpage saying "I ran into this problem, and here's how I fixed it." I think that the Gentoo Linux Handbook, and possibly other things posted online, would only be improved by efforts to take up these missed opportunities, in particular acknowledging that if you try to keep your system up to date, things will break, and if you're going to encourage people to keep their systems up to date, encourage them to know and use the right approaches when they follow your advice and something breaks periodically.
Handbook is about stable Gentoo. When you unmask stuff, you accept that it doesn't always have to work without problems.
Lukasz Damentko wrote: > Handbook is about stable Gentoo. When you unmask stuff, you accept that it > doesn't always have to work without problems. I was talking about stable as well as unstable Gentoo--it is my experience that a squeaky-clean stable Gentoo can and apparently will break on updates. I ran into http://www.ericbrake.ws/linux/gentoo/ss-com_err-e2fsprogs-libs-blocking/ , with comments referring to https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=234907 . So far as I know, that damage was on a squeaky-clean stable Gentoo without any unstable packages added.
You make some very good points, the latest releases of portage will resolve some of the blockers that come from time to time. Also I have noticed elog and news items being more informative in how to resolve problems that are encountered when updates are preformed. The e2fsprogs blocker and before that the expat upgrade I feel should have been done differently.
I am going to close the bug. There is nothing for PR to do here.
