Hi, i am thinking of switching to gentoo, and wanted to ask if its a good idea. Anything i should look out for?
Btw im coming Form arch
Thx :3
As a noob to Linux, reading Gentoo Handbook & Arch Wiki has made me not only understand a PC better in terms of software management of hardware but understand Linux. I am nowhere near being able to actually use Gentoo. I installed Arch once, that been far enough for me with Linux. I know the people that wrote those guides need to be funny for Presidency because this is how we need to run the world. LOL
Does seem like being funny helps with running for president these days
I don’t know what helps. It’s not that much better around the world. Everyone is in a war.
Take your time with the install process. It’s possible that you may breeze through it. It’s also possible that you may discover that, say, there’s something wrong with the EFI implementation of the system you’re installing to that you need to do some research to resolve. I’ve had both experiences.
Once installed, Gentoo is pretty much rock-solid, and almost any issue you have can be fixed if you’re willing to put the effort in. Portage is a remarkably capable piece of software and it’s worth learning about its more esoteric abilities, like automatic user patch application.
Do take the time to set up a binary package host. This will allow you to install precompiled versions of packages where you’ve kept the default USE flags. Do everything you possibly can to avoid changing the flags on webkit-gtk, because it is quite possibly the worst monster compile in the tree at the moment and will take hours even on a capable eight-core processor. (Seriously, it takes an order of magnitude more time than compiling the kernel does.)
Install the gentoolkit package—equery is a very useful command. If you find config file management with etc-update difficult to deal with, install and configure cfg-update—it’s more friendly.
If you’re not gung-ho about Free Software, setting
ACCEPT_LICENSE="* -@EULA"(which used to be the default up until a few years ago) in make.conf may make your life easier. Currently, the default is to accept only explicitly certified Free Software licenses (@FREE); the version I’ve given accepts everything except corporate EULAs. It’s really a matter of taste and convenience.Lastly, it’s often worthwhile to run major system upgrades overnight (make sure you
--pretendfirst to sort out any potential issues). If you do want to run updates while you’re at the computer, reduce the value of-jand other relevant compiler and linker options to leave a core free—it’ll slow down the compile a bit, but it’ll also vastly improve your experience in using the computer.(I’ve been a happy Gentoo user for ~20 years.)
I loved how tailored to me was Gentoo. But as time passes and your hardware gets older, the compilation times get longer and longer. That’s what made me to do the hop
I’ve heard some time ago that now Gentoo is offering more pre-compiled packages. But I don’t know the extent. libstd, gcc and libreoffice were the worst offenders in my time
If you’re going to be compiling your own kernel (or now Gentoo ships with pre-compiled ones too?) my word of advice would be “don’t forget to compile in the filesystem support”
When I was trying Gentoo I very much didn’t forget, I went I want them all. But I ended at my first attempt. It was bootable, but I was missing network drivers, and on old Core 2 Duo the compilation already took 3 days.
Yeah, with time the compile times only get longer and longer
if you have the time for it, then go for it.
Keep in mind and i’m sure you already know this but you have to compile everything yourself so it WILL take time. I have it on a sort of hobby machine and I remember just getting Firefox to compile/install took awhile. The benefit of this is you get an extremely custom tailored system for yourself. But like I said it’s going to take you awhile to get to that point. If you want something immediate to daily drive and want more of a custom system as opposed to Arch then maybe give NixOS a shot. I switched from Arch to NixOS on my main machine and I love it, won’t use anything else. But if you’re patient and have the time to dedicate to Gentoo then go for it, it’s fun to play around with on a Saturday afternoon.
If you want something immediate to daily drive and want more of a custom system as opposed to Arch then maybe give NixOS a shot
IMO the main customization part of Gentoo is that you can compile the world without the libs you don’t want to have. With NixOS (AFAIK) being also package-based, how can it offer more custom system than Arch?
It’s a great distro. You don’t have to compile; lots of packages are available as binaries, but having the option to compile the latest version of things is cool. Definitely worth a try, especially if you were using arch before.
I would definitely conpile everything from source
Its fun to learn how the system works, but after the 4-5th time trying to install something real quick, and there’s an error in your package.use or something, it gets a lot less fun.
If you have the time and patience, its really cool. But I just want a web browser without having to edit 3+ text files to allow it to work.
Not bad actually, but enable binary packages to speed up compilation.
If I could give only one reason to use Gentoo, it would be the community.
Anyway, if you choose this route, read the handbook through like a book first. Get an idea what you want your endpoint to be, then start.
Seeing how you take great pride in mentioning the distro you use (by the way) I fully recommend using Gentoo so you can one-up those Arch peasants. That is about all the practical use you’re going to get out of it though.
Why do you want switch to Gentoo in the first place? I think its a good idea if you want to customize and build lot of applications yourself. Besides heavy hitters like browsers or the Kernel. So only you can answer if this is a good idea for you.
I thought input and experience from other people would be a gold idea since i dont want to spend a ton of time on my Linux install just to notice that it is unrelyable and bloated.
How is it bloated if you decide what to put on? Gentoo isn’t a traditional distribution, its what you make it to. Still you have to answer for yourself why you even want to switch to Gentoo. And if all the extra work for compilation is worth it. Do you even want to compile everything and customize the compilation process? If not, maybe Gentoo is not for you. That’s the thing. Only you can answer that.
Yes. Gentoo is always a good idea :)
I used Gentoo for a few years. I don’t recommend it at all!
first off, there are no tangible advantages. it’s not faster. it is more customizable (by use flags), but the only tangible advantage of those is bragging rights saying you kept a certain library off your system and saved 100kb. just enabling all features is more practical.
there are tangible disadvantages. a big system upgrade can take days. and often fails. and, the manual time you spend merging config files with dispatch-config is large.
I switched from Gentoo to debian after 3y of using Gentoo. i switched from debian to arch after about 10y later. been on arch for about 6y now. would not recommend Gentoo
Those things you listed are part of the fact, not all. Like saving 100kB. It does not matter in your 1TB hard drive, but it’s night and day in embedded systems. No benefit for you isn’t the same to no benefit.
the 100kb u save from the right use flags is nullified by the hundreds of mb needed to have the entire build tool chain on your system. there are dedicated distros for embedded systems that are much better suited. like alpine Linux. or LFS. (IIRC with LFS u can get the entire system installed 2 or 3 MB)
I mean, you can cross-compile to generate a Gentoo rootfs for the embedded system.
I worked on embedded systems for audio devices. I of course endorsed Alpine as well, but with musl as the C library I got weird bugs of stuttering audio output.
With Gentoo I get the option to build my entire system with musl as well, but I would rather have that bug not in my system. That’s what Gentoo offers: options.
By “LFS”, I think you mean Buildroot, practically. Buildroot is also highly customisable, but Buildroot isn’t a distro. Like LFS, there is no way yo update a system, only rebuilding with latest packages. It also does not have flags for the whole system, so you’re on your own if you want to disable, say IPv6, in the whole system.
Happy with gentoo moved back after 14 years away, (ran 2003->2009, 2023->now) I like it because I can easily and sustainably make anything a package and build it as minimal as I like, along with easily modify packages (ebuilds) and flags as needed.
No advantage over Arch IMO.
If you want to play with it, setup a VM.
Comments complaining how everything takes time to compile in Gentoo are kind of funny, do you really need everything to be installed asap?
That being said, Gentoo indeed is not for everyone. I’ve been using it for +15 years and am really happy with it - almost zero maintenance and it’s super stable. The crux is the time it takes to be installed and people hold a weird grudge against it just for that.
But at the same time there are more distros oferring pretty much the same, i.e. your own arch.
