Gentoo is just so cool. Even after 6 months, I’m still in awe each time I see how well it works to integrate even the most exotic packages into one consistent running system.
Before I discovered gentoo, I’ve been using debian. Debian has the reputation to be very stable and therefore the right choice for servers. But that only holds true as long as you’re bravely continue using standard packages from the official mirrors.
As soon as you come across something that does not have an official package, you’ve got three choices: Find someone who provides a trustworthy package, create a package yourself or bypass the packaging system. Creating your own packages is complicated, so choice 1 or choice 3 it is. Using inofficial packages has killed my debian server once and bypassing apt-get means that any update to your system could make your hand-compiled binaries unworkable and the package manager can’t notice it.
It’s all different with gentoo. Everything is compiled on your own system, so the entire composition works together really well. Creating custom packages is also easy and portage (the “package” management system) will actually keep track of when your custom stuff needs to be recompiled. But that is seldomly required because as it is today, gentoo provides packages for just about anything.
Gentoo gives you choice. In debian, the only sane option for example was to use the premade PHP package provided. Gentoo enables me to change everything - whether to support sqlite, to incorporate XML parsing or to build the apache2 module - and I still get a slim and consistent system.
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