Yeah, until you need to hibernate to one. I understand that calculating file offsets is not rocket science, but still, all the dance required is not exactly uninvolved and feels a bit fragile.
I remember playing with Gentoo back in 2004-2005, going through the installation procedure from "stage 1" all the way through to the working system [1]
It looks like nowadays the handbook says just go from stage 3, which makes sense - compiling everything was kinda stupid :D
I made the mistake of hitting from stage 1 an `emerge world` on a Pentium 3 (I think? P4 at the very best) with a full Open Office and Firefox selection.
No idea how long it would take.
One week later I finally saw my new desktop!
I learnt a hell of a lot with Gentoo - only had a dvd and the magazine it came with stepping through the stage 1 install process. No internet connection to search for answers when things went wrong. Not my current daily driver but definitely some good memories!
The person in that thread could explain the situation a lot more better to the non technical users. You could do this:
"I don't know what happened to your computer but you seem to be saying someone hacked your computer and installed some software and you found acme.com mentioned on it. This was not done by me. acme.com is open source software that is freely available to anyone. This is the same as if someone installed software on your computer that mentions the google chrome web browser - that would not indicate google had anything to do with that action, since google chrome is freely available too."
> I did hear an interesting quote from someone techy that said "If you punch a whole in a plasterboard wall, it is now cheaper to buy a TV to cover the hole than get someone to repair the plasterboard."
reply