I previously mentioned this, but I wanted to spend a few minutes discussion this Linux Distribution that I recently installed.
As you may have seen in previous posts, I used to use Red Hat Linux. It was a good product but had some reliability issues, and was hard to maintain because of the frequency of patches. I also didn’t like the fact they were always many generations behind in Linux applications.
I decided to change distributions and moved to Gentoo Linux. Gentoo is similar to Red Hat in that it has a full package management system. Unlike Red Hat, it also has a free system to synch packages which ensures that you always have the newest version of each application on the system. That unto itself
is huge.
The other huge benefit is that it offers the ability to provide a more optimized installation than Red Hat. How? Well, you can set it up to install via source code. What happens is that you boot off of the Gentoo install disk which installs a small Linux kernel and Network drivers. You then download the source code and compile each application on your computer. Thus you have binary compilation that is fully optimized for your system. It works fantastically well! Between that and the package system, I am sold on Gentoo. I highly recommend this distribution. I have migrated all my Linux systems to Gentoo.