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For some reason when people explain what's so great about Git, they only talk about how it's "distributed".
No. Stop it. Stop.
That part of Git is almost completely irrelevant. Stop talking about it!
Okay, I say "almost" because I have indeed been stuck when using a centralized version control system while the company network admin decided to take down the network in the middle of the day. That can happen once in a while, or maybe all the time, depending where you work. But being protected from that is certainly not by itself a pressing reason to switch tools.
So stop focusing on how Git is "distributed." It does help make Git fast, but it's really not the important part.
The real reason Git is so good is that it makes things easy when your boss comes to you and says you have to stop working on the thing you've been working on for a week that isn't done yet, and you have to immediately switch to the new emergency of the day. Git offers several features that can be used either alone or in combination to painlessly isolate your incomplete code so that you can cleanly switch to a different task, even when the tasks are overlapping. For example, the `git stash`
command is invaluable, and `git add -p`
is worth its weight in gold. (You may consider yourself an expert only if you use `git config --global interactive.singlekey true`
.) Just a few fundamental features in this area are so convenient that you'll never want to go back to the hell of using other tools like Subversion where you have to isolate partial changes to files manually. That's really the best part of Git, and it is a pretty big deal. Very easy branching and merging is included in that, by the way, and that's a big deal in itself. But for some reason nobody mentions that part. It's almost as if they weren't even really creating branches before...
The moral is that I'm sick & tired of people parroting everything they hear about "new technology" without really knowing anything about it. Stop it. Shut up and actually experience something before you talk about it. Git isn't even new, yet we still have the same old misinformation floating around Wikipedia, etc. You're only doing this to yourselves, you know.
For some reason when people explain what's so great about Gentoo, they only talk about how it allows you to compile everything so it's optimized for your hardware.
No! Holy smokes, stop it! Stop.
That aspect of Gentoo is almost completely irrelevant. Stop talking about it!
Gentoo is fast, but it's not necessarily because you optimized the kernel, and anyway that's really not the important part.
One minor benefit of Gentoo is that it comes with almost nothing, and then it teaches you how to install only what you need. So you get to learn stuff, and you get to have a system that isn't loaded up with software you didn't really need that's doing who-knows-what in the background. Ahem.
But the real reason you want to use Gentoo is that when you need to install something, it just fucking works.
I'm so tired of distros that include modules and packages that don't work just because someone forgot to recompile them to run with the latest version of the distro. Don't they even test that stuff? It's like some guy is building those distro CDs using the mouse or something.
I'm so tired of needing to install something that requires that I compile it from source, and then there's an error because it has a dozen dependencies, and while I'm trying to compile those from source, there are more errors because of more dependencies, and finally I get to an error that I can't fathom because the dependencies are no longer compatible with the rest of the OS. Or maybe it's because I didn't program Linux myself. I know Linux is an OS by and for only programmers, but come on, a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Gentoo fixes all of that mess implicitly because (almost) everything I want to run is in Portage, and it's updated (almost) all the time, and it (almost) always just fucking works. Because everything is normally, systematically built from source, building from source is reliably painless.
And why do people like to complain about how long it takes to compile stuff? It's not like you're forced to sit and watch it compile. I don't get it. Don't you have 17 other computers you can play with while it's doing that?
I guess running Gentoo is a bit more intense than other OSes, but you're using Linux in the first place because you like computers, right?