Quote: Original post by 255
If you cannot handle installing manually from the command line then you should not be using gentoo yet. Gentoo is primarily for those who want to try out the latest software or build some radically customized setups. It is a rather poor choice for a stable server or a productive desktop.

I would tend to disagree, I use both Gnome and KDE easily on a daily basis right now. And as a server the last time I had to restart it was when we moved the server in to a new rack - it had been up for many months previously! Apache, mono, postgresql and at the moment I'm attempting to install Ingres. I first installed the system in 2004, and have been able to upgrade using emerge and the other relevant tools to the newest kernel without too much trouble. Yeah there are a lot of instructions to follow, but the support forums and documention is amazing - which is an impressive feat for any open source product.

Original poster take note thoughm, Gentoo is not for the faint hearted - but if you actually want to learn about Linux and have a decent Internet connection then it's a good distro. Though I think it likes to call itself a meta-distro, because it's all based in source. And as someone else said, that means when portage works properly (which 99% of the time it does) you can just emerge things and not worry about dependencies. Once you install it there's no need to put in any CDs, or get the latest version of Gentoo off the net - because that's all handled by portage on a daily basis anyway.

If you just want to have an enviornment ready rolled as a desktop, then the new fad is ubuntu - that's pretty good. If you want to try that out, it has a live CD... though my fav Linux on CD is Knoppix