3 ms·

Slightly OT but I'm happy to see breaking news from a gentoo.org domain. I long ago decided installing Gentoo was a young person's pursuit, but I'll always have

Slightly OT but I'm happy to see breaking news from a gentoo.org domain. I long ago decided installing Gentoo was a young person's pursuit, but I'll always have fond feelings for it.

dguaraglia 9y ago
You can always try Arch, it's like the more-adult version of Gentoo. Still a lot of work though.
- mohaine 9y ago
  Agreed but Arch isn't much work after the initial install. Well worth it for the rolling updates. Arch mostly just works. The big issue I run into is that the upgrades are _almost_ flawless, which bites you once a year or so when you least expect it.
  - nerflad 9y ago
    It becomes slightly more work if you depend on AUR packages (especially if you end up maintaining the packages you depend on!), but overall I think it's a great daily-driver system.
  - dguaraglia 9y ago
    I might give it another try when I buy my next laptop. Last time I tried there was way too much text-file tweaking for my taste (years of OS X have made me soft.)
- hawski 9y ago
  When I was a teenager I used Gentoo for a couple of years. I'm glad that I did, because I learned a lot. Of course it became tiresome after some time. However now I think about Gentoo as a more-adult one. It's really a meta-distribution. It was and is misunderstood by a lot of people. Teenage me included. Gentoo is deceivingly easy to setup - documentation is excellent and tooling mature. I think that the best way to use Gentoo is to really set all the USE flags and all the unmasking to one's will, but not for a single computer. There should be a binhost - a binary package server available for whole fleet of computers. You can also cross compile for a totally different architecture. Then the customization comes in handy. Also now it's certainly easier than when I've done it. I used Gentoo on a desktop with a whooping 512MB RAM. Now compile times are significantly lower. To sum it up: use Gentoo to build a custom Linux distribution for fleet of computers or for embedded devices. That's it's true power. Google chose Portage for ChromeOS building for a reason.
peckrob 9y ago
Same. Running Gentoo you learn a lot about how Linux works at a deep level. I'm glad I have that knowledge I gained running Gentoo and it's saved my bacon a few times over the years. But after about the third time that upgrading my system made it unbootable because I had missed some crucial step buried in the changelog or release notes, I also developed a deep appreciation of all the things modern distros handle for you. I rarely fear a dist-upgrade the way I did an emerge world.
djsumdog 9y ago
I started running Gentoo again in 2012 after I got fed up with MacOS Lion. I've since used it as my primary OS at three different jobs/work laptops and it's been my primary OS on all my person systems. It's a great OS and it's really fun to use and work with. My media PC has Void Linux on it, which is also very promising. I'd also suggest looking at Funtoo; which I used briefly on a laptop and it came with a lot of good sane defaults.

Slightly OT but I'm happy to see breaking news from a gentoo.org domain. I long ago decided installing Gentoo was a young person's pursuit, but I'll always have fond feelings for it.

dguaraglia 9y ago

You can always try Arch, it's like the more-adult version of Gentoo. Still a lot of work though.

mohaine 9y ago
Agreed but Arch isn't much work after the initial install. Well worth it for the rolling updates. Arch mostly just works. The big issue I run into is that the upgrades are _almost_ flawless, which bites you once a year or so when you least expect it.
- nerflad 9y ago
  It becomes slightly more work if you depend on AUR packages (especially if you end up maintaining the packages you depend on!), but overall I think it's a great daily-driver system.
- dguaraglia 9y ago
  I might give it another try when I buy my next laptop. Last time I tried there was way too much text-file tweaking for my taste (years of OS X have made me soft.)
hawski 9y ago
When I was a teenager I used Gentoo for a couple of years. I'm glad that I did, because I learned a lot. Of course it became tiresome after some time. However now I think about Gentoo as a more-adult one. It's really a meta-distribution. It was and is misunderstood by a lot of people. Teenage me included. Gentoo is deceivingly easy to setup - documentation is excellent and tooling mature. I think that the best way to use Gentoo is to really set all the USE flags and all the unmasking to one's will, but not for a single computer. There should be a binhost - a binary package server available for whole fleet of computers. You can also cross compile for a totally different architecture. Then the customization comes in handy. Also now it's certainly easier than when I've done it. I used Gentoo on a desktop with a whooping 512MB RAM. Now compile times are significantly lower. To sum it up: use Gentoo to build a custom Linux distribution for fleet of computers or for embedded devices. That's it's true power. Google chose Portage for ChromeOS building for a reason.

peckrob 9y ago

Same. Running Gentoo you learn a lot about how Linux works at a deep level. I'm glad I have that knowledge I gained running Gentoo and it's saved my bacon a few times over the years. But after about the third time that upgrading my system made it unbootable because I had missed some crucial step buried in the changelog or release notes, I also developed a deep appreciation of all the things modern distros handle for you. I rarely fear a dist-upgrade the way I did an emerge world.

djsumdog 9y ago

I started running Gentoo again in 2012 after I got fed up with MacOS Lion. I've since used it as my primary OS at three different jobs/work laptops and it's been my primary OS on all my person systems. It's a great OS and it's really fun to use and work with. My media PC has Void Linux on it, which is also very promising. I'd also suggest looking at Funtoo; which I used briefly on a laptop and it came with a lot of good sane defaults.