Linux Distro Wars

Someone pointed out this Gentoo flame article the other day and I just got around to finally reading it.

Well, it was lame. Not because the guy likes Slackware better than Gentoo, but because of the reasons he gave. His major gripe seemed to be that it was difficult to get KDE running in Gentoo.

I say bovine fecal matter. I just showed two relative Linux novices how to do this exact same thing in very short order, and I’m not even a “Linux on the desktop” kind of guy. Do you know what the key was? RTFM. Gentoo’s documentation is utterly sick. Between the official offerings and the Wiki, you can essentially do anything you want by reading the literature. That’s anything from getting sound working to getting Snort to report to MySQL.

Look, I’m a fanboy, to be sure, but I’m an inclusive fanboy — meaning I love singing the praises of my distro but I don’t get off on trashing the alternatives. My basic philosophy is that which is highlighted in my article called Geek Battles: A Call For Perspective.

Essentially, if you like a given tool and are able to use it to effectively create things, then that’s all that matters. How leet that tool is, or whether or not leet people use it, is irrelevant. You can’t be leet by using leet tools but failing to do anything with them.

Anyway, I digress.

I love Gentoo for a very simple reason — it’s the Linux distro I’m the most comfortable with. I have a good friend that spent a lot of time in a Redhat shop, and he keeps finding himself going back to it. Why? Because it’s familiar to him, and that’s the most natural thing in the world. Any fool running UberLeet Distro version 7 better know some serious Kung Fu if they intend to give my buddy any flak for running what many idiot’s think is a “lesser” distro. They’re likely to be severely embarassed. Ken knows crane style, and if uberboy isn’t versed in defecating chinchilla he’s in for a rude awakening. :)

Look, use what you feel comfortable with. For me that’s Gentoo (and Debian to a lesser degree). But for the love of God, if you don’t feel comfortable with a distro, don’t embarass yourself by claiming it’s trash — especially when the main problem you had with it was based on not reading the instructions. People like this need to seriously get a grip.