SAIGONNEZUMIGentoo Frustrations - Back to PC-BSD
Using Gentoo Linux, you have to get used to things just breaking, especially in the last couple of years. Portage is probably one of the best package management systems in the open source community. I have been quite impressed with Portage 2 the last couple months. Things seem to be improving.
Yesterday I woke up to check some email. Later I needed to do some web development for an NGO. I booted up and by the time I got to the graphical login screen, I noticed that I had a problem with my screen resolution.
I checked xorg.conf but there was nothing wrong with it. I kept restarting X only to get a very low resolution screen. Everything worked fine. I experienced this problem before with Sabayon Linux and an earlier version of Gentoo. No configuration files were changed in the last couple of days. I had not emerged and updated newer versions of nvidia-drivers, xorg, or KDE.
Sadly, the same thing happened back in 2005 which forced me to switch to Kubuntu. Yesterday I really needed a stable desktop to do my work. It was my fault, I should not have used Gentoo in a work environment.
Since I did not have the whole day to figure out what my problem was, I decided to back everything up on my Linux Mint Thinkpad. Back in came PC-BSD on my desktop. Within 10 minutes, I had a working FreeBSD desktop. Now I am using portmanager to update my PC-BSD system.
I still consider Gentoo one of the best Linux distros ever. It brought me to Linux but in the last couple of years, Gentoo users have watched developers, after developers leave in large numbers. Packages are no longer maintained and updated in a timely manner. Gentoo is no longer bleeding edge. It is no longer suited for the desktop.
Instead I will focus on using Gentoo more as a server. I will stick with PC-BSD and Linux Mint as my choice for desktop distros.
Amazingly, PC-BSD is the only distro out there that can detect my Intel hda sound card and play sound on all 5 speakers. VirtualBox will be ported to FreeBSD soon as well. Things are looking good for PC-BSD.
Edit: Seems that Compiz-Fusion was the culprit here. I am not a fan of Compiz so I just needed to remove it and everything worked fine.