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Comment by humbledrone | Hacker News Reader

> The exact moment I quit Linux was when an emerge pulled the latest raid-tools and broke my raid array.

Yeah, that's Gentoo. Such is life when you're running locally-compiled binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.

I'm running Ubuntu Precise right now, and can quite honestly say that I have not done a single system maintenance task in the six months since I installed it and set it up. It just works. Granted, I'm not doing anything too fancy with it, just basic software engineering.

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Yeah. I hate to sound snarky, but a Gentoo user swearing off desktop linux for good is exactly why we shouldn't be using Linux as a brand name. Ubuntu and Gentoo are miles apart in terms of how well tested they are on the desktop, and lumping them both under the Linux brand leads to this sort of confusion.

Exactly. I expect this from people who don't know anything about Linux or the concept of OSes in general (e.g. when people hear I use Linux they assume it's for "servers and programming" only), and frankly it's quite understandable in that case. It's a damn sight more odd seeing someone who "helped found Gentoo" be seemingly incapable of distinguishing between Gentoo and other Linux distributions in terms of system maintenance.

I found that funny too. Using one of the distributions known for the heavy customizability and for being a "do it yourself" distribution and then complaining that he has to spend time on it?

On the other hand, he uses apple hardware and loses "100′s of hours of productivity" (why didn't he just have it repaired) and what about it? "Long live Apple"

Such is the mentality of another apple user. (I realize that probably the vast majority of apple users are the ones I don't read about). But those that do and often end up having an article here... really?

> Such is life when you're running locally-compiled binaries that, depending on your USE flags, have been compiled with a combination of settings that nobody in the whole world has ever tested before.

I do exactly that on FreeBSD and never lost any raid whatsoever, possibly because the "raid stuff" tends to come together with the rest of the OS. There are probably issues that go beyond local compilation and flags.

Yeah, the USE flags was just an off-the-cuff example of how one-off a Gentoo system can be. Similar to your story, I ran Gentoo for years without any massive disasters, but there was definitely (for me) a nontrivial amount of regular maintenance.

I still thing Gentoo's great, and I'm glad I had a little fling with it, but ultimately I decided that the maintenance overhead was just too high for a workstation.

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