20 Years of Gentoo

From what I understand, there are more now that support that level of customizability, such as Arch.

What I really love about Gentoo, and why I still use it, is that it just happily upgrades without forcing things on me almost all the time. Sometimes I have to eselect news read and make a decision about something that's going out of support, but that's very uncommon. It's a rolling release that doesn't suddenly tell me I'm using systemd or insist that now I have to use nginx or whatever.

And since it's from source, all the compiler toolchain bits are already installed.

And I can funroll my loops and fomit my pointers.

Everyone should install Gentoo at least once. It's not hard, the documentation is excellent (up there with Arch) and you learn things. You may not want to, but you do.

Oh, and that color documentation? That made such a huge difference! Everything else was HOWTOs and black and white and here was well-written documentation with colors to help you understand the fixed and movable parts of the commands; chef's kiss.

Ooooo sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-6.1.28 just dropped, time to go! I'm coooooooompiling!

Also genkernel is one of the nicest interfaces to rolling your own kernel you're ever going to encounter. It's a joy to work with.

From summer of 2020 I restarted with Gentoo on my new home desktop.

Thank you Gentoo for everything.

It was also the distro I used when I first started contributing to an OSS project. And it was the reason why that project eventually added filters to limit what CXXFLAGS were used, since we got tired of having to debug weird bugs caused by crazy combinations of GCC flags:

https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...

And yes, I also went through a phase of having tens of options in CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Good times.

Maybe this company don't know how to work correctly with it, but this was not a good experience at all from a developer point of view.

And for what it's worth, I'm still using OpenRC on it and not systemd, a completely free choice that users have with a Gentoo system.

It's such a breath of fresh air to use Portage and Gentoo utilities compared to other stuff. It's designed so well, has beautiful colours, and the terminal output is clean of random warnings or errors that you constantly see with other distros (e.g. when booting or upgrading packages.) All the terminal output from Gentoo tools is super meaningful and formatted consistently.

There have always been video players and office suites in Slackware. I even remember having proprietary stuff like real video player and flash running on slackware in the early 2000's. What most non slackware users, or those that strive for small distros do not understand though, is that to get the most of it you usually do a full installation where everything is included. So it is not a frugal install in term of disk space but it is not huge either. Once you have that, you don't really struggle with the lack of dependencies as you rarely have to install a third party app but slackbuilds help you with that when you need it. Having said that with modern software installation methods like flatpak, appimages, nix-env and containers, I don't think a 2023 slackware user would be limited in application availability and ease of installation/management.

His experience of system breakage is something that you wouldn't expect from a same vintage slackware installation.

I've personnally used gentoo for a time, but I got tired quickly of long build times and keeping my computer on all evenings/nights just to do updates. When I am not in front of my computer, I want it shut off and not wasting power. I love that it still exist and give choice to users, especially in term of init system. I also believe that nowadays you can use gentoo with precompiled packages right?

Recently tried Funtoo for a while on AWS, but never felt right, as I could never get used to ego sync. Happy AWS now has community Gentoo packages.

Use other distros all the time, Amazon's Linux, Ubuntu/Debian, etc. as I've become too lazy to configure most things when they're running in isolation, such as Dockers or SNAPs. Don't need to be opinionated, just enjoy that bloat and forget it.

However, there's something very satisfying to Gentoo. The USE, and similar flags. Being able to set just what you need, nice slots, easy upgrades (usually, especially if you remember to add your USE to the respective package files vs inline). Can get everything as I like, where I need, and can really use a server fully. Don't think I'll ever give up my personal Gentoos on Linode, despite having various clouds and distros elsewhere. Something about it just feels like home.

Proof that DistroWatch ranking is the most meaningless metric.

The community support was hit and miss. Sometimes they'd be great, even when you were a bit salty. Sometimes, however, they were pretty hostile. The straw that broke the camel's back was being told it was my fault for upgrading packages without deep knowledge of the full implications of doing so.

As a Slackware user back in the day, I remember we used to poke fun at Gentoo "ricers" compiling everything with -O4 and a bunch of other flags in an attempt to make stuff run faster :-) Those were the days...

A room mate showed me Linux and I wanted to try it out. Yellow Dog Linux (A fork from Red Hat) was the stable/best option for PowerPC newbies.

I loved YDL but quickly realized that everything was a year or more out of date and by the end of the year I had distro-hopped my way over to Gentoo where I could get updated versions of GIMP, Inkscape and Firefox.

It took a few semesters but I did finally learn not to do any exciting upgrades the week a project was due.

I later switched to Ubuntu, because it was what "everyone" used, and it's easier to use the popular thing. The idea of a Major Upgrade every couple of years still scares me (and it still isn't flawless).

These days I might switch back, given that Ubuntu is slowly sliding into becoming adware.

But one debt I owe that project, is the ability for other distros avoid systemd. They separated (forked) out components from systemd for other distros to use. So a big thanks to gentoo for that.

As of now, Gentoo is 53rd - below the already dead centos. And Arch is in the 60’s.

Top ten as of this moment:

1 MX Linux 2773

2 EndeavourOS 2326

3 Mint 2078

4 Manjaro 1547

5 Fedora 1204

6 Pop!_OS 1198

7 Ubuntu 1138

8 Debian 1106

9 Lite 746

10 openSUSE 721

Imo only 4-5 make sense on that list.

I've probably used Gentoo for ~ 15 years myself, and I do think that the cli-only headless setup probably leads to fewer issues than with a full desktop environment.

The source-based environment does make it a lot easier to get the latest PHP, nginx, or Postgres.

The overlay system was also a pretty big bonus. So easy to set up custom overlay and just pull freeradius from git, apply our custom patches and deploy it in the overlay. By deploy I mean archive the source code + some metadata files. Then boot up a machine and configure portage to know about our overlay and then just install the entire suite of apps we needed.

Things have evolved a lot I have to admit. These days you just have artifactory or ECR and just push and pull your custom container images from there and boom .. custom software up and running.

I've been trying to like Gentoo for over four years, ever since I installed it on my primary laptop. I love the idea of having the fine-tuned control that Gentoo offers, and I love the idea that everything I install is tailored to my specific system.

But despite my best intentions I have not mastered it - in fact I barely feel like I understand it. When I remember to update it a couple times a week everything is pretty smooth. Go much longer than that and all bets are off. If I go on a long vacation I dread coming back to a Gentoo update. I just don't have the discipline to keep up.

Lately portage has been scolding me because some random packages are trying to install different versions of openssl. I've been ignoring it for weeks while I muster the courage to solve it.

And in my experience this kind of problem is super common. Either I'm pulling multiple versions of a package into the same slot, or I'm trying to merge a masked package, or some package is trying to put files in a place it doesn't own, or who knows...

Every time I try to solve one of these issues it's like I'm starting from scratch. I read manpages, online docs, bug trackers. I try various incantations of emerge flags. And eventually I show up the IRC channel with my tail between my legs.

Fortunately, the IRC community is extremely knowledgeable and can usually fix my problem in no time. But I hate having to ask for help, and I never seem to get closer to solving them myself.

The other major issue I have is convenience: it sometimes takes so long to install a new package. I get it - that's what you expect with a source-based distro. But man I did not understand just how much compiling time I'd need. Krita releases a new patch version? There's a couple hours with my laptop fans blasting. My laptop has easily spent 10x or 50x the time compiling Krita vs actually running it! And that's just one random program; god help you if you want Firefox on the same machine.

Anyway, on my next computer I'll probably install Arch.

Playing around with Gentoo is a distinct memory: downloading the two CD images too two nights on my connection at the time. Compiling everything felt like I knew way more about computing than I did. I felt smart, powerful and in some sense, an outlaw.

It had a profound impact on the fact that I still work with software, many years later.

Thanks to everyone involved.

Indeed, eating the learning curve and looking the toolchain in the eye is important.

Also important:

- not spending excessive time watching gcc output scroll by

- not falling prey to USE exuberance and having the system 'splode

Hence: Arch.

Also - the constant fiddling with CXXFLAGS even though my knowledge of C++ was fairly limited.

Distrowath is a questionable metric. But it doesn't mean that decline isn't correct.

I dread every portage sync and upgrade of packages.

When it works, it works. But now you have to deal with Python depreciation every few months.

Every upgrade something might break which potentially has you spending your precious time on pointless maintenance, which could be better spent being productive.

My Gentoo forums account is from 2001. Back then, Gentoo truly was the learning distro. Starting from Stage 1 you learned a lot about Linux. Nowadays that's not the case anymore.

The young, idealistic me believed in Linux as means to freedom and betterment of society. But what I met on those forums back in 2003 was ignorance and arrogance. Not exclusively of course, but more than in other forums I used to frequent.

The community also became toxic (has recovered) and the management intransparent. CoreOS used Gentoo as their base for their OS. Double standards, maintainers could be toxic while bug reporters would get banned. I got banned when I told the PHP maintainer to do his job or step down. How dare I.

I wrote that Gentoo needed to be more transparent, Google had sent some money their way but nothing about that was mentioned. Entry for new, young people wasn't easy and still isn't. They don't care. What they care about is donations and to have something to show for on their resume. But those donations remain intransparent. Some elder staff are really cool, like Ned.

Well if there wasn't so much stuff on that server that migrating to a new one would be a long and cost endeavor, I'd have dumped Gentoo years ago.

I wouldn't know what to replace it with. CentOS is apparently shunned, Alma or Rocky? Ubuntu with their snaps is out of the question. Arch is not for the server, and it tends to break on a regular basis. Gentoo is just a pain in the ass to maintain. But on the pro side, you can have your own packages easily, well if you care to read the bits and pieces of the ebuild docs cluttered around everywhere.

His comment on Gentoo: "Dude, Gentoo. That's for the kind of people who mod their cars."

Once Arch showed up with the same kind of philosophy but you didn't have to compile it, the writing was on the wall.

Yeah the guide was great, but I had a ring binder with printed documentation for installs. Every time I installed Gentoo I had to get that thing out. It took ages.

I picked up a lot doing that but I wouldn't wish that starting point on anyone. I should have looked at one of the many easier distros.

Oddly at a very similar period in time (circa 2003/04). I've seen a bunch of posts recently reflecting on Gentoo and people saying they got started around 2003, was there some zeitgeist around the distro at that time?

So what are now the recommended CFLAGS ? /s

Asking for a friend.

I would love to switch to OpenSUSE TW (which I think is better than Fedora despite both being RPM based). I just hate the way apt works (think about all the dependencies that remain on the system when uninstalling a program).