Gentoo is great. I used it for a few years 20 years ago and I still think the package manager is the best I’ve ever used. I wouldn’t use Gentoo today, but I’m really glad I went through the install and maintenance process. It didn’t make me a guru, but I did learn a thing or two about Linux.
USE flags are addictive.
they are :)
I have a soft spot for Gentoo, even though I haven’t used it in years. It was one of my first experiences with Linux, since it was installed in one of the computer labs in college. I just remember that the windows had this physics jiggle effect when you dragged them around. I was so surprised that Linux had a more “fun” aesthetic than Mac or Windows did.
Yummy
This looks like a lolly of some kind, I want to eat it
It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃
Damn, it looked like candy to me too until I read your comment. Now all I see is candy guitar pick.
Y
it’s fun
Don’t you have to build everything from source in gentoo?
Nowadays it also has binary packages.
What the point of using Gentoo with Binary packages?
Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.
You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.
When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.
That’s for you to decide.
you still get huge amounts of choice and really good tooling
That would make a huge difference.
I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.
Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.
Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.
tbh, with modern CPUs it can be a lot easier. especially if you’re a bit picky about your packages and get a binary package for your browser.
I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.
Packaging rust is terrible, compiling rust is terrible. How can it be this awful? Why is the rust compiler so terrible?
but having binaries
For big packages like browsers and office suites, not all packages.
Still a win if you’re so inclined. I prefer to compile 100%.🤯
Well… kinda takes the edge off… i’ll stick to compiling.
It sounds like a cool distro but I don’t see any advantages compared to NixOS, aside from maybe the option to make it more minimal for constrained environments.
it’s a lot less scuffed in some ways while still giving you a lot of control and a lot of tools for declarative system management. it’s also waaay better documented. it’s comfy.
Completely different – nixos is about repeatability, while Gentoo is about build optimization, customization, and performance.
Why does every one need to compare every distro to NixOS? We get it. It’s neat. It’s immutable. It’s indestructible. But they are fundamentally different stuffs.
You can set it up to compile all your software yourself with the exact options you want, just like Gentoo. Not how most people use it, but still, NixOS can fulfill some of the same roles as Gentoo, they are very comparable.
I tried it for a bit – it is similar to freebsd in terms of the package install process.
