When you think of Gentoo, you tend to think of it being a difficult distribution, where you compile everything yourself.
There’s much more to Gentoo than that. Yes, some of it comes from building from source: the flexibility. But a lot of it comes from the wider Gentoo philosophy, the philosophy that brought us all together. The idea that Gentoo is the distribution we’re making for ourselves and people who enjoy Gentoo. So if I were to make a few arguments for Gentoo, I’d focus on that. And this is what I’d like to do here.
↫ Michał Górny
When I think of Gentoo, I think of an immovable, sturdy object that has always existed, and will always exist, because it doesn’t really care about being trendy, user-friendly, or flashy. I generally group it together with Slackware as one of the very pure Linux distributions, that focuses more on doing things the correct way, and if they can’t be done the correct way, it won’t be done at all. Neither Gentoo nor Slackware are really my jam, but the amount of respect and admiration I have for both projects is immense.
Górny highlights a few other characteristics of Gentoo that appeal to me as well, such as a ban on “AI”-generated code, its strong independence and lack of corporate backing, and its flexibility stemming from the fact it’s source-first. I feel like even when the entire world has crumbled to dust, Gentoo will still be there, ready and available to anyone who has the enthusiasm to jump in.
We must protect Gentoo at all costs.
I’ve been using gentoo since pre-egcs time, for dozens of PCs, laptops and servers, most of the time professonnally. It’s definitely not for beginners, but extremly powerful. I nearly left (probably for arch) at the end of 2010′, because it was dying. But since then, it’s slightly better, so i stick to it.
I have been a Gentoo user for about 10 years, from the late 90’s (when it was still guided by Daniel Robbins) to the late 00’s (when I purchased my first Mac). During the latter years I also contributed to the distribution as an official developer. As a learning experience it proved invaluable, and the knowledge I acquired on it helped to kick-start my career as a software developer. From the late 00’s I have been a Mac user for about 10 years, then a Windows 10 user for another few years. I have recently returned to Linux as a daily driver. Right now I am running Bazzite (which is an immutable distribution of Linux) as a daily driver, mainly for the convenience of not having to think about configuration and hardware support. I am not sure Gentoo is the best choice for the present-day me. Now I work full time, have a family with two children, and my parents are definitely aging. This leaves me with very little time in my hands, most of which I prefer to dedicate to tasks other than troubleshooting my PC. Still, I made a couple of attempts at running Gentoo again, but both times I failed. First attempt, I configured it with OpenRC (instead of systemd), only to discover that if you want the full experience with KDE, systemd is more or less expected, otherwise you have some limitations. I had to recompile parts of the OS several times because something I needed was not covered by the set of USE flags I chose. I had to configure a few unofficial extra Portage repositories because not all the software I wanted to use was available in the main repository. At some point, a combination of these factors caused emerge to systematically fail at updating the system. In the end I got annoyed and nuked the installation. I made a second attempt this week, with a ‘keep it easy’ mindset. I picked KDE desktop profile and kept customization to the bare minimum. The only real deviation from the standard was that I wanted my file system to be ZFS (I have a dedicated, always on, TrueNAS server in my lab to provide storage, so ZFS is the obvious storage choice here), which is something that the official handbook does not cover. So I used a second handbook for the parts related to file system configuration. Compilation worked, but the instruction provided to get ZFSBootMenu up and running had something lacking, because even if the commands to set all the EFI stuff apparently worked, something crucial was clearly missing because afterwards the computer simply utterly failed to detect the new installation, let alone attempt to boot it. These are all problems that can be solved with time and effort, but the almost-50-years-old-me is starting to think about computers in terms of an appliance to use rather than something you have to spend serious time in maintaining…
Last night I was going to post a similar story of my attempts at installing and using Gentoo, but I thought “no one wants to hear of my failure”. Well, your recent attempt is almost word for word what I went through, except I stayed with traditional ext4 instead of ZFS, and now I feel validated!
I turned 49 last week and I had taken the week off of work to just rest and relax and catch up on delayed projects so if I wasted a few hours playing with Gentoo it wouldn’t stress me out. I followed the handbook to the letter, choosing OpenRC since I prefer classic init setups and it’s not a server so I don’t really need all the sysadmin baggage that comes with systemd. I also chose the KDE profile; I prefer Xfce but KDE is my other favorite DE so why not? That ended up not being my issue though; as I said I followed the handbook exactly and was completely successful right up until grub installation. It simply didn’t see my kernel, even though I could see the kernel in the correct directory. I tried manually deleting and reinstalling the kernel image, again nothing. I nuked it all and did everything once more, again following the handbook to the letter and double checking every step, but once I got to that point again, grub just refused to acknowledge the existence of the kernel image. I gave up and decided Gentoo just isn’t for me, even though I’ve had great experiences in the past installing and running other “expert” distros like Arch, Crux, and KISS that require similar procedures and manual kernel installation.
I kind of feel stupid, but at the same time I know I did everything right, and I wonder if there is something incorrect in the handbook but I’m not familiar enough with Gentoo to see it clearly. Regardless, it was never going to be my main OS, that role is served by OpenBSD these days. If I ever do go back to Linux as a daily driver it will be Void, my old faithful standby.
I still have a machine running Gentoo, but the experience is getting different over the years.
The beauty of gentoo for me was always tunning everything in the OS into my preferences. But that is less easy now after systemd.
Normally one can select in between many options for all the typical things running underneath. Now, the people of gentoo is trying hard to maintain alive both systemd and non-systemd options, but the handbook is not that easy to read anymore. At the end, the easy option is to attach to a full systemd OS, and them any of the desktops will run fine. Unfortunately, that makes gentoo much less particular.
I came to Gentoo around 2005/2006 when I tried installing Ubuntu somewhere and failed miserably. I had been using Mandrake/Mandriva up until then. With Gentoo, by following the handbook I went step by step, until stuff started breaking. It took me a week, but the install was successful and the base knowledge for my future life had been acquired. In retrospect, this was probably a really pivotal moment for me.
Without that switch I probably wouldn’t have the skills I have now, let alone the capacity to think “outside the running system”. Meaning I know my system uses systemd, but when developing something, I need to keep in mind alternatives.
I’m still running Gentoo, my current install has been chugging along since 2015, survived in-place migration from ext4->btrfs, openrc->systemd, merged-usr, python2->3, KDE5 -> 6, went through 4 hard drives (installed on spinning rust, now happily sitting on an nvme), 3 microarchitectures (core2 -> zen4 -> zen5; using -march=native, changing the CPU requires recompiling the world) and is now sitting in my Framework 13.
I compare my Gentoo system to tending a garden: from time to time take out weeds (remove outdated/unused packages), try planting new things (try out new software), make things grow the way I need (set use flags/cflags per my desires), and from time to time create a new bed or have other major work (migration of a major component, like the merged-usr migration was).
As a developer, multiple parallel versions of python/gcc/clang/postgres are a godsend. never needing to hunt for -dev and -debug packages is awesome too.
As a user, the possibility of 2 speed of updates is absolutetly brilliant: KDE bleeding edge, system stable. And it’s native to the distro.
It’s why I stopped using Archlinux : the churn of upgrades was too fast for me too keep up.
Reminds me I need to go donate for this year.
I used Gentoo as my daily driver for several years back in the 2000s. Installation and setup went well back then as long as you followed the ~40 page install guide to the letter.
Troubleshooting, on the other hand, was much more difficult — I spent a lot of time on the Gentoo Forums figuring out e.g. webcam drivers. And the system was generally just not very good at recovering from half-completed updates, which ended up being important since compiling e.g. KDE was an overnight job. This on top of the “bug discovery” experience that attends every rolling-release distro.
That wasn’t;t necessarily a bad thing because I learned a lot about linux internals; back then, a Gentoo install was maybe 10% less work than Linux From Scratch. So if anyone needs me to troubleshoot a circa-2004 linux installation my Gentoo experience has prepared me well.