Gentoo vs. Debian

I’ve been playing with Linux since 1999 and using it steadily in one
capacity or another since 2001. I’ve tinkered with just about every major
distribution out there and have come to some overall conclusions that I
thought I’d share.

Gentoo

Gentoo
>
has been my distribution of choice since 2002. My buddy Ken and I giddily
installed it one night; we were admittedly taken with the whole source-based
craze and couldn’t wait to get our hands on it. Another friend of mine was
pushing for our circle to go the route of
Sorcerer Linux
>
— a competing, soon-to-be-dead source-based distro.

Anyway, Gentoo quickly became my distro. I’ve run it as a file server, a web
server, a game server, and yes — I even ran it on the desktop for like a
month (didn’t work out…). At one point I must have had over five Gentoo
boxes running at once in various places. Anytime I installed Linux I
insisted on it, and when people asked me about it I gave the standard fanboy
responses, e.g. faster because it’s compiled for your system, etc.

But as time went on I started learning more and more about Linux. As I did I
started realizing that most of the things that people said were über-cool
about Gentoo were rather unimportant to me, and the little things started to
matter more and more. I liked how they handled runlevel control, for
example. I liked the fact that no services listened externally by default,
unlike Debian, Redhat, SuSE, etc.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that networking seems more smooth and
dependable on Gentoo. I can’t count the times I’ve tried to change IPs,
change NICs, switch from DHCP to static, etc. with another distro and had it
become a hassle. With Gentoo you get spoiled because most everything just
works the way you expect it to.

Over time it became a simple matter of familiarity. I had used Gentoo for so
long that it just felt right. And to this day it’s still
my comfort distro. Hell, I even have it as my license plate.

The biggest advantage Gentoo has over all other distributions is
its documentation
>. It’s insanely good–to the point of just making other offerings look
silly. Many times I’ve been looking for how to do things in Debian or Redhat
and found link after link on how to do the exact same thing in Gentoo
instead. The forums are great too; between the docs and the forums I’ve
almost never come across an issue in Gentoo that I couldn’t solve.

Debian

While Gentoo’s been my true love since I got into Linux heavily, I’ve always
had tremendous respect for
Debian
>. I have a number of friends who’ve always been Debian
fanboys proponents, and
we’ve had plenty of Gentoo vs. Debian debates over the years.

The thing I love about the Debian project is that it’s so professional and
stable. It’s “business-class”, so to speak. It’s comforting to know that a
ton of Linux administrators all over the world depend on it daily and demand
excellence from it. Gentoo, as cool as it is, has “screwed me” on a number
of occasions while running it in important roles.

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Granted, this wasn’t Gentoo’s fault really; it was my fault for assuming
things would “just work” when running emerge -u world using the “~x86”
option. Shame on me for not being more careful, but still–having a distro
that you can do confidently do a full update on is golden. That’s what
Debian offers.

It’s The Package Manager, Stupid

These days, now that I’m a professional first and hobbyist second, I have a
very practical approach to my Linux distribution choice.

In this space there’s simply nothing better than
apt
>. Don’t get me wrong,
Portage
>
is great…but it’s no apt. What makes apt so great? First of all, it installs
binaries. Watching stuff compile is cool, to be sure, but when time is of
the essence there’s no substitute for now.

Plus, apt doesn’t break stuff. It’s rock-solid. I mean, I’m sure it gets
borked every once in a while just like anything else, but I’ve never had it
break. Trust in a package manager is of the utmost importance when you run
Linux on a server that’s important to you, i.e. anything more than a box at
home running your own personal stuff that nobody else expects to be up.

My Current Distribution Breakdown

• GentooPersonal Servers // any Linux file, web, or other
  type of server.Primary Security Distribution // my main Linux
  distro for basic security tools such as snort, nmap, nessus, hping,
  tcpdump, etc.

• DebianPrimary Web Server // the distro
  danielmiessler.com
  >
  is hosted on. Confidence in the stability of updates is critical, hence
  Debian.

• UbuntuWork Desktop // serves as host OS for
  VMWare
  >, upon which I run all my OSs required for work. I put nothing in my
  host OS.Recommended Linux Desktop // I point anyone interested in
  trying Linux to Ubuntu.

• BacktrackStandalone Security Distro // for a security-only
  distro this is currently my favorite.

This system works for me. In my opinion it uses each distribution’s
strengths to the most advantage. This does mean I’m basically moving from
Gentoo to Debian (and from emerge to apt-get) as my primary Linux OS. I’m
still feeling some guilt pain over this, but I can’t help it that I find apt
so attractive.

I’ll still continue to give to the Gentoo project as I always have, and
it’ll still remain the distro that I have the most feelings for. Oh, and if
Portage ever develops the speed (binaries) of apt along with the stability
and polish of the Ubuntu desktop (as a base for VMWare), I’ll be right back
where I belong
>.: