Comments for Review: Gentoo 2007.0

@Oli

I couldn't disagree with you more. Gentoo Linux is all about simplicity. The most difficult part is the install. Maintenance afterwards is easy as a pie. To be honest I can't understand people why people can put up with distro's which have their inner workings hidden from their users making it almost impossible to troubleshoot or maintain.

I installed the live cd 2007 on VMware WS 6- no problems. Networking, X all worked

worked for me on VMWare 6 too, no networking probs at all.. it started mouthing off at me on my older version though so i had to upgrade to 6 (can't recall because i'm at college now, but the older one's probably lower than 5.5).

Mick

I don't understand why people review distributions that cater to experienced Linux users and complain that they're not newbie-friendly. To me it's just bizarre. It's like reviewing a novel for adults and saying, "oh, this is no good...kids learning to read would really struggle with this". Well...yeah.

There are books written specifically for people who are learning to read, just like there are Linux distros that specifically aim to ensure they're accessible to newbies. I don't use Gentoo, but I check out all the popular distros from time to time, and the last time I had a look at Gentoo's GTK installer, it quite clearly stated that it was intended to make the install process faster. That's all. Not easier, just faster. In other words, "click" instead of "mke2fs -j -O dir_index /dev/hda1" or whatever. The assumption was still that the user knew what s/he was doing...otherwise what the hell was s/he doing installing Gentoo instead of something like Ubuntu?

Bugs are a pity, and a buggy install CD is particularly bad, as something that all new users will run ought to be well tested. But as for, "people scared of typing in commands and whacking return are going to struggle with it": if someone "scared of typing in commands and whacking return" decides that Gentoo would be the appropriate distro to install on his or her scarey computer thingy then that person is probably the kind of person who struggles with everything, not just Gentoo.