Gentoo, You Suck

I just spent 4 days and nights, between work-hours, installing Gentoo on my Powerbook. Gentoo is a Linux distribution that requires that you install everything from source. It's automated, so you don't have to compile everything by hand, you just have to let its package manager compile it for you.

This is undoubtedly the most useless Linux distribution I've ever used. I've installed it on a PC before, and had moderate luck there. It's snappy, for sure. I don't think it's because it's "optimized" for the computer you're installing it on. I think it's just missing a lot of the cruft that plagues distros like Redhat and Mandrake.

But you know what? You can't even boot the thing after installation until it's spent 24 hours compiling shit you've never even heard of. I did that. I sat the machine in the corner overnight, and let it compile KDE, X11, and whatever else it decided was a requirement of those. It took about 16 hours, and once it was done, KDE loaded just as slow as it does on my Mandrake PC.

I want my 4 days back.

The fonts suck under Gentoo. There's no denying it; I've seen it with my own eyes after a default install. I don't think I should have to muck around with a million different font config files to get it to Win98 quality. I did it anyway, and it DIDN'T WORK. I read every fucking forum there is on gentoo.org that had anything even remotely to do with freetype, PPCLinux, sub-pixel hinting, antialiasing, truetype formats, and whatever whatever whatever. The whole time, I'm getting a headache reading the horrifically rendered pages in firefox and konqueror; and in the back of my mind is the image of Mandrake booting out-of-the-box with the best-rendered fonts I've ever seen on a system, OS X included.

In the end, the problem is a symptom of the general Linux mindset. Linux users, myself among them, take criticism terribly. You install Gentoo per instructions, and you get crappy fonts. You complain, and they tell you you did it wrong, that you should edit a million different config-files, and thank them for the pleasure of it all. Linux has the best font-rendering abilities of any operating system, and the Gentoo people can't get their shit together enough to take advantage of it. Even the dolts at RedHat can offer you a decent X11 build! Nice fonts can be easily acheived, apparently, but the Gentoo boneheads are 10 years behind the other guys. Even Slackware has a jaw-droppingly beatiful default desktop configuration! You guys are uglier than Slackware. That takes work.

So, Gentoo, in case you missed it the first time, you suck. Your compile-time bullshit isn't worth it. Mandrake is better-configured, more feature-complete, less arrogant, and faster than you. So are Fedora, Yellowdog, Slackware, Knoppix, Debian, MoviX, Linksys' WRT54G, and the isdn4linux floppy router for that matter. My cell-phone has a better GUI. You are a pox on the Linux landscape. You take a good system like Linux and turn it into a joke, a sad self-parody where productivity takes third place behind teen-angst-style quasi-nonconformity and horribly unnecessary gruntwork. As long as Gentoo exists, every troll in COLA will have the final word.

Project, kill thyself and do us all a favor.