Yesterday was the big day. After a package update of my Gentoo system, which took way too long anyway, libexpat seemed to get an update also. What’s the deal? I see you think. Well that there where around 35 packages which linked to it and needed to get recompiled. *Sigh* and that after hours of waiting to get the update finished. So I started revdep-rebuild and wanted to do some development underwhile. Not possible! about every app I needed was linked to that lib so i had to wait while my system was completly unusable for that time.
Ok that was it. I was tired of all that waiting and besides that I needed a new harddrive anyway (had 40G, now 160G weee!). I figured out that this might be a good moment to try another distro. After some threads of vanRijn I decided to go for openSuse. Because I don’t have an dvd burner I did the network-install-dance. This went quite ok except that http sources didn’t work for me. After waiting another half a day I had a ready-to-use opensuse system. With some extra nice goodies working out of the box which I coudn’t or didn’t try to install on Gentoo.
Drifting away from Gentoo made me think about it. It came to me that I use Gentoo as long as I use linux. I started using it when I started my bachelor degree in software engineering, 5 years ago now. It has some very nice qualtities. For example the docs are outstanding for starting Linux users. There’s a lot of documentation on their official website and besides that there is a wiki which contains another bunch of usefull information. Also the user base is quite helpfull in the forums. I also liked the possibilities of useflags and splitted kde packages. Install only what I need and also install only the parts of the installed software you need. Quite cool, I’m gonna miss that. However waiting hours to get your system updates is just not what one wants (at least I don’t want that anymore). Also the developer community is something I dislike, or at least the way they communicate with eachother. They should become more aware of the fact that not only devs, but also users read their mailinglists. However I’m gonna miss some of that devs a bit! Yes guys I read your weblogs all that years. No hard feelings, just time to move on.
Now I’ve copied my mail and stuff back, set up a kde4 development environment and actually compiled (*sigh* does it ever end? =;) I should be able again to get some work done.
So farewell Gentoo and hello openSuse 10.2!