Just wanna preface, I’m not trying to like attack Gentoo or anyone that uses it, I just wanna understand lol
I’m like an intermediate Linux user I’m definitely not an expert, and Gentoo is something I’m still quite confused about. To me it just seems unnecessary, like the real version of people making Arch just seem incredibly complicated. Does anyone actually use it as a daily driver? Why? Is it just for the love of the game? Is there some specific use case I’ve not heard or thought of?
Full time user of Gentoo since 20+ years here. Oll servers, workstations, laptops and even on an android tablet once.
It’s not complicated at all, mostly just different from anything else. And truly configurable to the last bit.
Edit: it seems there aren’t may gentooers here, AMA :)
Hallmark of a true gentoo user.
Nothing’s difficult if you know how to do it
Free climbing?
Really, it’s mostly understand what your are doing and editing text files. Much easier and better documentation than most other distro.
Yay AMA! ❤️
How do you feel when you(have to use) a different linux system of that happens? Is it as different that it’s like “using” MacOS or Windows to you?
How lo does it take you to set up a system from scratch?
what’s the biggest downside from your perspective?
Thanks in advance!
Using a different distro feels awkward. I am so used to how stuff is organized in Gentoo :) but it’s still Linux, so no, it’s only minor differences.
(Spcially, i hate when using a SystemD based distro, because i am not used to it and it honestly feels cumbersome compared to OpenRC. Gentoo also has SystemD support, it fully support it, but i never found the need for it, so i never switched, and never got familiar with it. My fault)
Last weekend i setup a laptop from deleting the windows partition to full LXQT desktop in 4 hours. The laptop is quite fast, and i skipped all ocmpiler hogs like firefox (choosed firefox-bin) and rust (choosed rust-bin). Later on, i also installed a full plasma+kde environment in some more 10 hours (all compile time in background, while using the laptop on LXQT).
The biggest downside of Gentoo is being so niche, i always fear that some day it will be abandoned due to too few people maintaining it. I had this fear for the last 10 years, and never happened, so.
There are no real downsides to Gentoo IMHO, except becoming too expert with Linux :)
Thanks! Highly appreciated :) Your “compile” time alone I wasted when I accidently screwed up disk encryption - and couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with my kernel parameters for a long time. So your numbers are not really shocking.
Edit: decrypted message.
I think your autocorrect went a bit too far, I cannot understand what you wrote.
I wish I could blame auto correct but I’m afraid at least 2/3 of that was (and is) sleep deprivation :(
Hopefully a bit cleaner now and thanks for the pointer.
Like with inetd, httpd, smtpd and so on it’s systemd (system daemon) with a lowercase d. SystemD looks like D is the name or version of the system.
It’s certainly not complicated. Just tedious. That said I like the BSD style portage.
These days I tend to run on Arch based distros. Because they are close to those levels of configurability. Just a bit quicker to setup and get to a nice preset. I know there are pre made stages to skip some of the tedious setup for both gentoo and vanilla Arch. But then why not a distro where that’s the base. And some of the sub distros like Garuda provide some really nice configuration tools on top of the base experience.