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veber-alex | 5 months ago
A friend and I wanted to play around with Linux, so we installed Mandrake[1] Linux on a school PC. We didn't know what we were doing, and the GUI (I think it was KDE3?) abstracted too much. It was also very unstable.
I don't remember how I got to know about Gentoo, but I then proceeded to install and reinstall Gentoo on my home PC (Athlon 64) about 20 times, and this was when you had to start from stage1, so you had to do a full bootstrap, kernel, and system compile; no binaries and no shortcuts. The scrolling gcc output on my screen was the coolest thing ever.
The Gentoo handbook was amazing. It taught you exactly how Linux works and how to install every component of the system.
After a while, I began contributing to the distro and even became a developer for a few months but had to quit due to real life.
I don't follow Gentoo today, but if it's still valuable as a tool to learn Linux, I can highly recommend it.
LargoLasskhyfv|5 months ago
Regarding Mandriva/Mandrake, I'm remembering that as having the cleanest /etc with just the relevant information in its config files, generated by the installer. And not copy/pasted crap like it was common on Debian, then. PC-LinuxOS took that approach, too. But RPM, nay!
As to learning effect, I'm doubtful.
https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ would be more appropriate for the foundations.
With Gentoo, you're just learning their abstractions, as flexible as they may be.
Which one could nowadays do in any virtual machine, as time and motivation permits.
Because suspendable on demand. Continue later.
Then trying that thing on real iron, and maybe replacing the virtualization host with it, when it passed the smoke test :-)
Which applies to both, LFS & Gentoo.
gaws|5 months ago