Gentoo Is a Project Car

I stepped into Gentoo at the age of around 15 and it was probably the best Linux distro for a teenager nerd. Time and curiosity was plenty and Gentoo sucked up/consumed all of them. As a grown up with a job, I even find Arch on desktop sometimes too time consuming, but on average it is a good compromise between rolling releases charming Gentoo and old men's Ubuntu/Debian.

I run Gentoo as my daily driver. I love it. I not only compile Firefox from scratch, I compile Chromium from scratch.

Like the author, Gentoo was what gave me sysadmin skills. I didn't know how much until I recently had to set up two Gitea instances on one Gentoo machine.

There are no tutorials for that, so I had to figure it out. And I did, thanks to Linux from Scratch and Gentoo for making me a sysadmin.

I just wish I had those skills when I had a sysadmin job right out of college. Man, I bumbled around a lot.

This just makes me feel old :). https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...

There are some good things in Gentoo. It encourages users to use the system, to interact with it.

A lot of linux distros are compiled for the lowest common denominator. Is only recently that gcc introduced suppport for generic optimisations.

Also with the tendency to use more and more libraries this leads to a situation where the user is at the mercy of the distro maimtainer.

I use Slackware, but when i have time, i compile from source. There are many unneeded packages which only bloat the system.

My currrent setup consists of KDE desktop on Gentoo stable as the base and using the AUR(through distrobox) for installing any packages not in the main repo and also any package that would rely on 32 bit packages (steam for example) and I'm pretty satisfied by it!

It's just amazing how it all glues perfectly and I no longer have to distrohop.

Funny to be reading this, because on Friday, I decided I should join the modern world and install Arch (I’ve been using Gentoo pretty much exclusively since it was new).

It’s Monday, and I’m back on Gentoo. And the reasons for that surprised me. (And yes, I spent all of Sunday compiling).

Arch was not as stable. I don’t know why, but I was having weird crashes (mostly with audio apps). Gentoo breaks at the install stage from time to time, but I do not ever have random application crashes.

The Gentoo docs are better. Those are fighting words, I realize, but I find the Gentoo Handbook a lot easier to work with than the Arch wiki. The GH is more opinionated, but I feel like that’s a strength.

Your mileage may vary, I suppose, but since when do gentoo users care about mileage! ;)

I used gentoo exclusively for a couple years on various machines, mostly because of need: I had one of the first revisions of the AMD Ryzen 7 1700X which was plagued with a silicon bug. You could mitigate this issue by compiling the entire system with a recent enough version of GCC and some specific flags. Coming from Arch, I found gentoo to be some order of magnitude more stable, while performance wasn’t that much different. I enjoyed it so much that I ran it on my MacBook Pro retina and an old thinkpad x61s, which took almost two days to compile GCC 6 :’)

If we follow that project car metaphor - https://www.calculate-linux.org/ is project car where you can get all parts pre-machined (already compiled) and you can still customize bits and pieces, or even whole thing.

That said - it's default config/profile and use flags are such that it's rare some package needs to be compiled.

i once used a funtoo, a spinoff of gentoo which uses git instead of svn, in my early 20s. i didn't learn much from it because my hardware and use case were the happy path. i guess gentoo provides much better environment if you want to go your way to learn linux desktop and "classic server" administration.

My emerge.log dates back to 2005. I've moved it from old machine to new machine over the years. Growing old with it :-D