Reflections from Michał Górny
Tried it once for a few months. Installing software stayed taking hours forever. Gave up. Arch forever
We have pre-compiled pkgs now, but arch is fun too
I’m currently on CachyOS but I am feeling the pull of Gentoo more and more. Some day…
i installed it 20 years ago and have daily driven it since. i’ve never needed to reinstall or anything, it has just evolved with the times and my tastes. i love being able to customize everything. i have it wake up and update itself on a schedule so i’m rarely waiting for compiles to finish. everything is tuned for my hardware and it feels really snappy. idk it’s just great. not for everyone!
I think Gentoo users fall into two main camps.
Those with old and/or niche hardware requirements.
Those who like to micro manage their systems.
The guy who talked me into trying Linux years ago ended up on Gentoo after Arch ended up not being modular enough for him, He was constantly tinkering…and breaking his system.
After his free time got taken up by a job he ended up switching to Fedora.
I started out in the micro manage category but now I run Gentoo because it is the most easy and most convenient distribution out there. If you configure Gentoo to be stable, it is just stable and chugs along without ever complaining.
I literally installed it 5 days ago on my 14 yo PC: Fedora was too much ahead for my hardware, Slackware had some incompatibilities with it, Debian was crawling slow.
Gentoo is really good: took a day to install it because I needed to learn how to use lvm with initramfs on uefi and some other small things. Not much recompiling thanks to binary repository.
And its blazing fast, my PC is flying like its 2014 again!
Today I have to recompile qtwebengine because I need digikam, and this will take time I guess. But for now I think its worth it.
Yeah, Gentoo is really good, but I dropped it the day I needed to edit a system, so I installed GIMP (there was no binary for it at the time), a few hours later I tried to open the image and realized I had forgotten to add the libpng (or similar) flag so didn’t had the support for the image type. Took me less time to install Arch than it would have taken me to recompile Gimp.
the point of gentoo is spending all your time watching packages compile.
not talking shit, i love it.
Don’t they now offer compiled packages as well ? Or did I misread?
Yes, precompiled packages are available, although only for 1-2 common combinations of USE flags per package.
that’s what PyLova and irc are for Only compile when getting ZZzz’s😴
I wish I could use it but I don’t have enough CPU cores for this
It’s not as bad as people make it out to be honestly. Word processors and browsers suck because of libraries iirc, that’s about it tho
I have a 2 cores 4 threads machine. I don’t know it it’ll be practical for me. Might try it when I can afford something a little bit more powerful
I used to be a Gentoo user. I do really miss portage and its USE flags. I learned so much too. First few times I bricked my system, it was a reinstall, but I got to the point I could fix any issue I came across. My CachyOS install borked it self the other day and because of my Gentoo experience it was no big deal to load the live image and chroot in and fix it. But that’s also why I moved away from it. I messed around and found out a lot. It was fun. But when you get home from work and it is no longer fun to spend a few hours to get your computer going again… You find a new distro. Debian is what I use for my servers and CachyOS is my current desktop and laptop. But I still think about checking out Gentoo again one day…
Same here. It was my first Linux. The Gentoo Handbook circa 2005 did not even attempt to hold your hand. But when I got through, it worked well! I got into dependency hell and bricked my system trying to upgrade Firefox. I like how Debian is stable, but I still do wonder about Gentoo.
I don’t know the first thing about Gentoo but just the first 3 points
Gentoo aims to be independent
Gentoo aims to be secure
Gentoo aims to be made by humansDamn I want to try it now.
If only I had 72 hours in a day…gentoo has binaty repos now, depending on your config you can get most packages from them
Do you know a good package to decompress and read jpgs that could compile overnight (incl. dependencies ofc)? Can’t seem to open your image properly
Just add the JPEG use flag and recompile your whole system. EZ PZ
