Podcasting + Excercise : A Perfect Match

Someone pointed out
this Gentoo flame article
the other day and I just got around to finally reading it.

Well, it was lame. Not because the guy likes
Slackware
better than
Gentoo, but because of the reasons he gave. His major gripe seemed to be that it
was difficult to get
KDE
running in Gentoo.

I say bovine fecal matter. I just showed two relative Linux novices how to
do this exact same thing in very short order, and I’m not even a
“Linux on the desktop” kind of guy. Do you know what the key was?
RTFM. Gentoo’s documentation is utterly sick. Between
the official offerings
and the Wiki, you can essentially do anything you want by reading the
literature. That’s anything from getting sound working to getting Snort to
report to MySQL.

Look, I’m a fanboy, to be sure, but I’m an inclusive fanboy — meaning
I love singing the praises of my distro but I don’t get off on trashing the
alternatives. My basic philosophy is that which is highlighted in my article
called Geek Battles: A Call For Perspective.

Essentially, if you like a given tool and are able to use it to effectively
create things, then that’s all that matters. How leet that tool is, or
whether or not leet people use it, is irrelevant. You can’t be leet by using
leet tools but failing to do anything with them.

Anyway, I digress.

I love Gentoo for a very simple reason —
it’s the Linux distro I’m the most comfortable with. I have a good
friend that spent a lot of time in a Redhat shop, and he keeps finding
himself going back to it. Why? Because it’s familiar to him, and
that’s the most natural thing in the world. Any fool running UberLeet Distro
version 7 better know some serious Kung Fu if they intend to give my buddy
any flak for running what many idiot’s think is a “lesser” distro. They’re
likely to be severely embarassed. Ken knows crane style, and if uberboy
isn’t versed in defecating chinchilla he’s in for a rude awakening. 🙂

Look, use what you feel comfortable with. For me that’s Gentoo (and Debian
to a lesser degree). But for the love of God, if you don’t feel
comfortable with a distro, don’t embarass yourself by claiming it’s trash —
especially when the main problem you had with it was based on not reading
the instructions. People like this need to seriously get a grip.