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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>while other distributions have been actively removing one's freedom to choose

I think that's a bit unfair. Everyone wants to support everything, but at the end of the day if you want to guarantee security and maintenance and do the job of a distribution you have limited resources on what you can look after. Something always has to give.

On any Linux distribution anyone can install what they want, but what you can genuinely claim to support is always limited by the amount of maintainers you have.

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Perhaps I was being overly harsh. That being said, there is a certain philosophy of non-intervention which gives Gentoo a sense of freedom that other distributions lack. It’s not only about diverse support, it’s about allowing the user to choose upfront. Arch does this as well (mostly). It’s easy to choose your own bootloader, WM/DE, audio server, and etc. I just think that Gentoo takes this philosophy one step further. If you want to install an alternative init system on most distributions you can… but you have to uninstall SystemD and all its weeds first. Gentoo’s solution is simple. Give the user a choice on EVERYTHING upfront.

> there is a certain philosophy of non-intervention which gives Gentoo a sense of freedom that other distributions lack.

While I was untangling update dependencies one day I had it uninstall libc. There was a big warning advising me not to do that, but it was allowed.

Everything broke immediately, of course, but I recovered the system and the dependency problem really had been fixed, too!

This gave me a permanent positive impression of Gentoo. It's better to be allowed to do things than not.

Debian and Ubuntu will let you do this, too. Pop_OS may have patched it out downstream, adding an additional barrier before you can uninstall 'essential' packages since Linus Sebastian unintentionally blew away X11 (in the face of a very dire warning, which he ignored) on camera.

Idr how this is handled on RPM-based distros, but on Debian it is part of the standard procedure for crossgrades.

(More impressive than this sort of flexibility, imo, is how NixOS and GuixSD sidestep this problem altogether.)

Love this example! In general the way Gentoo handles masked packages also highlights this point. The system will kindly warn you if something is wrong, but it will never stop you from doing what you want. --autounmask also makes it dead simple.

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