i think he meant pro in terms of having understood the os

yeah... i meant pro in the sense of how well you know linux and it's internals.

i agree that for quickies you wanna take binary distros but belief me... the extra time (and it's reallllly less time than plain LFS like I do) in compiling stuff for GenToo is not really big. normal apps I compile in no time on my 1.5GHz athlon and even a bulk like FireFox is done in around 30mins (donno exactly, long time ago since i last compiled firefox).

EDIT: but GenToo and LFS are mostly for hard core fr34ks, although I've seen lots of newbies using GenToo and they got along as well as with a binary distro

[edited by - RPTD on April 2, 2004 7:29:56 AM]

I''d recommend Knoppix from the live-cd, as well. It''s easy, and it''s Debian based ..

I will throw in my vote:

First linux distribution: Xandros (although it costs money) or SuSe
Intermediate Distribution: Debian
Advanced: Gentoo

Also to those who were complaining about compiling in gentoo its really a non-issue after the first time. If I already compiled KDE 3.2.0 and 3.2.1 comes out and I upgrade, 3.2.0 still runs fine while compiling 3.2.1 so it''s not like my system isn''t just as functional.

quote:

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
Gentoo pro? I doubt a professional would use gentoo. I''m sure professionals have better things to do than sitting around on their ass waiting for things to compile.

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We use Gentoo extensively becuase they take customization seriously. And of course we don''t sit on our butts wait for stuff to compile, we have other computers to use while the compiler farm does that.

There is a 2CD set that comes with many pre-built binary packages, and you can make own by simply running quickpkg or adding -b as an emerge option.

I can''t see how a professional can use Fedora, SuSe, etc... and wait for months or years for them to catch-up and turn-out an rpm for a library, program, or kernel you need to use. We ending up using more source tar balls than rpms.

Started with RedHat, then tried Mandrake, SuSe, Slackware, a couple of embedded versions (TSLinux, Vector Linux), Debian, and finally Gentoo.