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I have to say, despite running Gentoo for more years than I can remember, the only time I've ever had anything break on me was when I was first starting out. I

I have to say, despite running Gentoo for more years than I can remember, the only time I've ever had anything break on me was when I was first starting out. I had a mask conflict causing issues during emerge/package update and it was only because I was doing something exceptionally stupid. Note that this didn't actually cause me any problems, it just made me change how I was doing something to the correct way of doing it. Outside of that however, Gentoo has been the smoothest distro I've used in a long time. I've tried out Arch (started out on Arch), RHEL, and Debian in the past but nothing has been as cooperative as gentoo has been. Portage is really quite a slick packaging system for what it is. Every time I've had an update that could be potentially risky, I've just followed the upgrade instructions (eselect news) that Portage gives me and within 15 seconds any potential issue has been resolved. Mind you that like you said, this is very much a "mileage may vary" scenario however after switching to Gentoo, it really is hard to want to go back to other distros when the system is so low maintenance after the initial install. TL;DR Gentoo isn't really as much of a wild west distro as people make it out to be. It is bespoke to be sure but there is very good documentation and during any update Portage provides a very clean and straight forward way to handle the rare manual intervention as well as integrating new package and system configurations into your own. Maybe this was out of place but I always see people portraying Gentoo as either a toy for experimentation or too crazy, bleeding edge, and unstable to use for real purposes.

smitty1e 6y ago
Maybe I was eating too much learning curve or not gentoo-ing responsibly, but the Kernel and X11 were perpetual sources of woe.
- jacoblambda 6y ago
  The initial setup in Gentoo is definitely the hardest part but once stuff works, it seems to work until the end of time. With the kernel, manual configuration more or less is the following: 1. emerge sys-kernel/gentoo-sources 2. Configure the kernel with "make menuconfig". Manual configuration is just turning on the stuff you need and turning off the stuff you don't. If you don't know what it is, either look it up until you do or leave it as default. 3. "make && make modules_install && make install". 4. Add any kernel modules to /etc/modules-load.d/ If you don't want to configure the kernel yourself(seriously would recommend learning to do this, it is surprisingly easy and once you do it once, you just tweak your config as necessary), you can use genkernel to automate the process. Running genkernel should work in almost every case unless you have some kind of esoteric hardware you need to support. I think you just need to run "genkernel all" nowadays to do a full genkernel config, build, and install. As for X11, I definitely remember fighting with it a bit initially but nowadays it is supposed to essentially work out of the box more or less like this: 1. Add your GPU and input devices to /etc/portage/make.conf with "VIDEO_CARDS=", "INPUT_DEVICES=", and add X to your use flags. 2. Install xorg-server, xorg-drivers, and test it with xstart. Everything should work out of the box on most hardware. 3. Install your desktop/display manager of choice in portage and follow the wiki steps in the docs for said manager. For most of them this should essentially just involve enabling the services in OpenRC or Systemd. No idea about wayland but that's mostly just because I haven't been able to be bothered with moving away from X11 for any good reason.
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    But then the temptation to get weird with the keywords sets in. . .

smitty1e 6y ago

Maybe I was eating too much learning curve or not gentoo-ing responsibly, but the Kernel and X11 were perpetual sources of woe.

jacoblambda 6y ago
The initial setup in Gentoo is definitely the hardest part but once stuff works, it seems to work until the end of time. With the kernel, manual configuration more or less is the following: 1. emerge sys-kernel/gentoo-sources 2. Configure the kernel with "make menuconfig". Manual configuration is just turning on the stuff you need and turning off the stuff you don't. If you don't know what it is, either look it up until you do or leave it as default. 3. "make && make modules_install && make install". 4. Add any kernel modules to /etc/modules-load.d/ If you don't want to configure the kernel yourself(seriously would recommend learning to do this, it is surprisingly easy and once you do it once, you just tweak your config as necessary), you can use genkernel to automate the process. Running genkernel should work in almost every case unless you have some kind of esoteric hardware you need to support. I think you just need to run "genkernel all" nowadays to do a full genkernel config, build, and install. As for X11, I definitely remember fighting with it a bit initially but nowadays it is supposed to essentially work out of the box more or less like this: 1. Add your GPU and input devices to /etc/portage/make.conf with "VIDEO_CARDS=", "INPUT_DEVICES=", and add X to your use flags. 2. Install xorg-server, xorg-drivers, and test it with xstart. Everything should work out of the box on most hardware. 3. Install your desktop/display manager of choice in portage and follow the wiki steps in the docs for said manager. For most of them this should essentially just involve enabling the services in OpenRC or Systemd. No idea about wayland but that's mostly just because I haven't been able to be bothered with moving away from X11 for any good reason.
- smitty1e 6y ago
  But then the temptation to get weird with the keywords sets in. . .