I’ve spent the last two days building up Gentoo on my IBM Thinkpad T41 (2379-DJU). Because I was in a hurry, I did a Stage 3 install, which basically means that the base system is pre-compiled, in my case with Pentium 4 optimizations. After that finished, all that was left was configuring and compiling the kernel, and installing the user space.
That part was very easy. Out of the gate, I had no problems with the ethernet port and connecting to the net. Wireless just took an “emerge ipw2200” and a few tweaks to the net script. Installing the user apps was a pain in the ass, though. With all the good things I’d heard about Portage, I was expecting it to be at least as solid as ports on FreeBSD, and I was disappointed. I have a feeling that a lot of it may be that I wasn’t taking full advantage of USE flags, but “emerge sun-jdk” took several attempts and tweaks to get it to build.
The weird thing is that the tasks that I expected to be difficult were easy and vice versa. Configuring wireless and getting X to use the ATI Radeon drivers was trivially easy thanks to the Gentoo Documentation. Building and installing MySQL 4.1 which was in Portage but masked proved to be kinda painful. I found plenty of documentation referring to package.keywords and package.unmask and describing how to perform very specific tasks, but nothing that explained the big picture of what was going on.
After some emerging and unmerging, I have settled on a system which I think will be workable for the near future. I’m using X.org with the ATI Radeon drivers, which is performing well. I’ve chosen Enlightenment as my window manager and ROX as my desktop and session manager. I chose to avoid Gnome and KDE as they seem excessively bloated, and ROX does everything I want. Firefox and Thunderbird for my Internet suite, GAIM for instant messaging, and SciTE for text editing. I could use a new terminal application, as I find Eterm pretty annoying and ugly.
At some point I’ll have to discuss getting ACPI working, but at this point, I haven’t so I won’t.
Compared to FreeBSD, Gentoo just doesn’t demonstrate the same level of elegance and maturity. Of course I’ve only used FreeBSD as a server, so I don’t know what it would be like on a laptop, but I’ve installed it on several machines, and all the installations went off without a hitch, and ports have built out of the box. The ports have also been more up to date than on Gentoo.
And as a desktop, compared to OS X, Linux appears to be a joke. I can’t believe anybody would call it a viable replacement. Hell, even compared to Windows, every window manager and desktop I’ve looked at sucks. I guess I got brainwashed reading all the Slashdot comments.
Anyway, unless I come across something awesome, my laptop will be losing Linux as soon as I’m done with my current client.
Well, if your standard is a hacked-together gentoo system, of course it’s not going to really shine as a desktop. The closest thing to OS X on Linux really is Gnome with metacity, and the closest thing to Windows really is KDE with kwin. The lighter weight environments are nice for different purposes and old machines which would never be able to run OS X or WinXP in the first place, although I would not call enlightenment lightweight. Try Ubuntu with Gnome and see if it’s nicer; I think there’s certainly more attention to user experience. As for Java I’ve had zero trouble installing blackdown from ftp://mirrors.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/blackdown/debian on debian and ubuntu machines.
As for terminals, gnome-terminal and konsole (surprise) are the most friendly, although good old xterm is a good stopgap. If you don’t have an LCD screen for subpixel antialiasing, you may want a bitmap font; there is a redhat package in fedora (bitmap-fonts) which gives you the “MiscFixed” font in every size that I end up installing on such machines.