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One reason is that I learned how to install a system that way with Gentoo 15 years ago and I don't need to learn it again now. It's still a slow process even wh
by ubercow13 7y ago
One reason is that I learned how to install a system that way with Gentoo 15 years ago and I don't need to learn it again now. It's still a slow process even when you know what you're doing (though I still usually do it the slow way)
- cyphar 7y agoOne counterpoint to this is (back when I used Arch), I found Arch to be the fastest-to-install distro if you already knew how to do it. No need to wait 2 minutes to boot a graphical installer that doesn't let you pick what packages you want (this is significant if you don't have Australian internet speeds), or forces you to set up your partitions in a certain way, and so on. You just partition your disk, pacstrap, chroot, run a few setup commands and reboot. The last time I installed arch I had a working system in 15 minutes -- other distributions took 40 minutes to bootstrap and reboot so I could start configuring them (mostly because of how long it took to download the 3000 packages I didn't need). Obviously there is a level of "it only takes 3 commands to install gentoo" here, but I personally long for the minimalism you get from Arch's no-bs installation.
- ac29 7y agoI, too learned how to Linux with Gentoo ~20 years ago, and while that semi-from-scratch approach still appeals to me, Arch 2019 is not Gentoo 2002. I find myself doing an Arch install once a year or so, and I'd say it takes about 20 minutes to get to my prefered desktop from completely un-initialized hardware - I remember Gentoo taking days!
- 8draco8 7y agoThe complexity of installing Gentoo is the same as Arch, the only thing that slow downs the process for Gentoo was compiling all the packages. 2002 CPU speeds wasn't helping either.