I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.
Why would you use 4 package managers to do 1 thing ? Most people who use arch use 1 and it does the job. All of them are built around pacman + smth for AUR packages. Personally I use pacui. Why would you convert package from other distro, if another distro has it then it most certainly exists in the AUR, never once had to touch another distro's packaging.
I don't know about the "the modder's distro" part but I personally had much less headaches with it than I had with Ubuntu,fedora,debian, and CentOS.
The only thing that sucks for me (regardless of distro) is Nvidia updates.
A lot of software packages I've been using lately don't exist in the AUR. My tastes might be more niche than yours, I don't know.
> Why would you use 4 package managers to do 1 thing ?
Because all the software I'm trying to install has documentation like "install with pacman" or "install with pamac" or "install with yay" or "install from source" or "install from AUR" or... I think you get where this is going.
> Your experience sounds weird. Reading it remind me of people who come from programming paradigm X try paradigm Y and only use methods from X only to conclude that Y sucks.
Reading your rebuttal to my experience reminds me of people who answer questions on Stackoverflow like, "why would you do it this way? Your question isn't valid, your question _should have been_..." That is to say, rather than attempt to understand where I'm coming from, you thought to overwrite my experience with your own, as if yours is the truer experience to be had. My time using Arch and Arch-variant distros led me to having a seemingly fragmented experience over where to find software. That's got nothing to do with X being better than Y, it has more to do with X being mostly one or two overall places to find software, and Y being fragmented between 4-5 + conversions between apt/yum packages and PKGBUILD scripts. I'm not saying Y is inherently worse, I'm saying it's a fragmented and confusing user experience, in my humble opinion. My main dev machine still runs Manjaro because I've come to enjoy its opinionated handling of Arch, though if I were to re-image that computer I'd probably go back to either Fedora or Ubuntu.
> but I personally had much less headaches with it than I had with Ubuntu,fedora,debian, and CentOS.
Personally, I'm fine with using Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, or even Arch. I'm not saying any one of them are bad or worse than the other. I'm just saying that, to me, Arch came with some additional challenges that I don't experience from other distros, mostly revolving around how software packages are found and installed.
I understand that a newcomer at the beginning can be confused about the relationship between pacman, pamac, AUR, yay, etc
similar cli programs exist in other distros though are not as encouraged.
That is how I read it, but it's all good. Sorry for misreading your tone.
> I understand that a newcomer at the beginning can be confused about the relationship between pacman, pamac, AUR, yay, etc
Perhaps that's the source of my confusion. So with:
Red Hat-like distros the tools are usually dnf or yum, which are evolutions over rpm.
Debian-like distros the tools are usually apt or apt-get (which are more or less the exact same thing), which are evolutions over dpkg.
With Arch, I kind of assumed that pamac and pacman are similar things, no idea if yay is related to anything else though. And I think pamac actually can install things from the AUR. My confusion definitely stems from loading up documentation from every different piece of software I tend to install, and each one of them listing a different utility for installing their package. If these are all the same thing with different UIs, installing packages from the same repositories, then that's definitely where I got lost.
And then I'd often be further annoyed to find out that the software vendor doesn't have a package for Arch, and nobody put one in the AUR yet, so I'd take the deb pkg and run it through debtap to get a PKGBUILD script. Doing which has netted me varied results.
AFAIK you can use any POSIX shell as `/bin/sh` on Arch Linux. By running `sudo ln -rsf /bin/dash /bin/sh`, dash works well.
I tried Arch and what astounded me the most is that the docs didn't seem as good as Gentoo's. That surprised me because I end up looking at Arch's docs all the time and it's all of a very high quality.
But the Gentoo Handbook is really a masterpiece. I've never read a clearer explanation of how to go from unformatted disks to a working system.
I then moved to debian/ubuntu and recently switched my main server to Arch. And you are right - I got back this feeling of having all my 10 fingers in the system and living on the bleeding edge.
Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically nothing more so it should have been Debian(a fire-and-forget OS)
Same!
Starting with a Stage 1 install was what got me (with some guidance of a friend and the perfect Gentoo Wiki) into Linux circa 2004 (IIRC).
Now, some 20 years later, i much prefer to have not to deal with something as... dare i say.. fragile... anymore.
Yes, much of the breakage i dealt with was probably self-inflicted but always a good learning experience - but most of the time not at the most convenient time :(
I did Stage 1's as well around the same time but eventually got tired of doing that every so often or fighting Portage and switched to Arch.
Then I got tired of dealing with Arch... and ended up on Fedora.
I always liked Gentoo and Arch, but I don't have the energy to put up maintaining them anymore.
Around 2004, I was building Gentoo up from stage1 just like many other commenters.
For 2024 and personal stuff I’m back on Debian and it’s safe enough I pull security updates daily - entirely automated and no review on my part. It essentially never causes a problem. Updating once a year sounds terrifying to me given the rate of vulnerability discoveries of late.
As ever your mileage may vary and your systems aren’t my systems, but Debian truly is a wonderful OSS project and as of August 2023 it celebrated its 30th anniversary!
Gentoo going binary feels weird :) I’ve still got a soft spot for Gentoo and what it enabled me to do 15 years ago when I had more time for personal hacks.
Now I'm in the process of moving my desktop computers to Archlinux, to enjoy better control and up-to-date software.
Servers I keep in Debian for the same reasons you mention: stability and safe automated updates.
I dunno, there's a fair amount to be said for having an up-to-date kernel, systemd, and Docker. :)
The main problem is that if I provide a specific repo for docker (to keep a fresh version) it can request some dependencies and bam! I have a Debian-Turend-Arch system to maintain :)