Has Gentoo 2008.0 Returned the Distro to Greatness?

As posted last month, Gentoo doesn’t see a new release all too often. The latest 2008.0 release promised vast improvements though, and a completely renovated installer, using Xfce as the front-end to help get things done. Although I haven’t yet taken a look at the latest release myself, our tuxmachines.org friend Susan did, and had quite a bit to say.

She installed the OS via the Live CD twice, with the second time being the charm. For those who don’t know, Gentoo is more of a power-user’s distro. It avails full control over the system and allows you to configure everything, which does become a hassle at times, but means you really have a system fine-tuned to your liking. It’s noted in the article that despite improvements made here, there are still some near-showstoppers that could turn some newer adopters away.

Gentoo is without question my favorite distro, but I do wish the installer was made more reliable in order to gain new users. Half the fun of the distro is to learn the ins and outs of Linux, but needless compile errors or bugs that cause root accounts to not be set up is not the most fun method of learning. It’s because of that, that I highly recommend any new user to install via the minimal CD. Once you install the OS by command-line, you’ll feel like a genius, even though once it’s done, you’ll realize how easy it was.

When I began using Gentoo in 2003, everything worked like clockwork. Results were practically guaranteed and always to my liking. I had stability and a slight but noticeable increase in performance. But the greatest thrill of running Gentoo was the sense of ownership. No other system in the world was exactly like mine, and mine was exactly as I wanted. That’s hard to achieve with binary distributions.