Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] Marketing SMGL: Competitors and differences? Help needed

sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Public SourceMage Discussion List

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Duane Malcolm <d.malcolm AT auckland.ac.nz>
  • To: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] Marketing SMGL: Competitors and differences? Help needed
  • Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:58:34 +1200

I tried Gentoo over a year ago, I gave up pretty quick. Mainly because summon and cast was done in series. This was bad for users like me who have a 56k modem. You'd hope that you can download programs while you compile a big program like xfree86.


Jaanus Heeringson wrote:
So I'm at it again, burning the midnight oil.

I have recently read a lot of different articles about Linux in general to try and get a grip on the "feel" out there, and this is some things i found out:

1. There is a confusion about choise of distro. At least more than there was a few years ago, mostly due to the big ones starting to charge for updates etc. People change distros often and simply can't make up their minds. This is good for us, and we should take advantage of it.
2. Gentoo is big. It is almost allways mentioned alongside the other large commercial distros. This is good since more people are interested in sourcebased distros, and bad because we have a lot of work to do if we want to make ourselves heard next to them.
3. A lot of the intermediate users are very tired of choise. They simply don't want to research at every corner to install the appropriate stuff (which MTA, DNS etc) and are asking for a "preferred setup". This maby don't concern us yet, but it might in the future.

I'm a bit interested in gentoo and how it differentiates from SMGL. I have read in on it a bit, but don't currently have time to install it now. What I have found so far does not seem very impressive, at least not when it comes to the base system. This of cause is not enough, so I need more input reguarding this issue. I'm sure there are a lot of you out there that try Gentoo now and then, so could you please describe your view of the differences between Gentoo and SMGL? What's good & bad? What are the major differences?

My gut feeling is that in order to get some attention we will have to compete with Gentoo to get it, and since they actually are a for profit company, it will be quite a task. In my opinion we need to find a couple of point on how we differentiate us from Gentoo in a good way.





Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page