It’s thanks to Gentoo that I’ve been a Linux sysadmin for over 20 years. That being said, I’ve since moved to Arch and then Debian.

Some points: On modern systems you won’t really notice any speed improvements from custom compiling the packages. Apart from maybe some numbers in articial benchmarks. On old systems with very limited resources, you can eke out a bit of more performance. Back when I was still using Gentoo, my proudest moment was getting a Pentium 1 with 96MB Ram (Yes, MB!), which was a gift of a colleague to his broke brother, into quite a useable little machine. Browsing, listening to MP3s, email, some simple games.

I also noticed a noticable improvment in performance in a 400mhz Athlon I had setup for my mom.

That being said, I was only able to do this, because I was using distCC to distribute compiling across several machines to keep compile times to a somewhat sane level. Also, I was doing a unpaid internship at the time, so I basically had all the time in the world, so compile times didn’t really bother me.

I had tried to use linux before. After Windows XP crashed one too many times. I decided to see how things work on Linux. I initially chose a “easy to use” desktop distro. (Mandrake Linux). Got everything setup. Even 3D Accelaration worked. Everything was really nice and fun. Then I tried to tinker under the hood and I broke something that I couldn’t figure out how to fix. So I thought, maybe I need to find something even easier, so I chose Suse Linux. Same story. Set everything up. Desktop working, 3D working, etc… start to tinker, break something, back to square zero.

Then I decided to change my approach and choose the hardest distro. The choice was between Linux from Scratch and Gentoo. Linux from Scratch sounded waay to painful, so I chose Gentoo.

It took me 3 days until I had a somewhat working system without a desktop. Then another 3 days until I had a desktop running Fluxbox.

But the learning experience was invaluable. Being forced to use the CLI and not only that, but more or less configure everything by hand. It takes aways the fear of the CLI and you get a feel for where everything is located in the filesystem, which config files do what, etc… It demystifies the whole thing substantially.

You suddenly realize that nothing is hidden from you. You are not prevented from accessing anything or tinkering with it.

The downside is that Gentoo takes a lot of time and effort to maintain. But the learning potential is invaluable. Especially if you use it to also start doing little projects in linux. e.g. File server, router, firewall, etc…

Me knowing Gentoo, got my first real job as Linux Sysadmin and before long I was training rookie Admins. And the first thing I always did with them was to run them through the Gentoo bootcamp.

Once they go to grips with that, everything else wasn’t that difficult.