I am a a Gentoo user myself and once I got through the learning process, I literally cannot stay on any other distro anymore. Here's what I would suggest and this is what I do. For me, the biggest problem with gentoo for me (which you mentioned) is that things don't just work until you fiddle with the kernel and other packages. This can lead to some embarassing moments when you realize that you cannot mount your friend's portable hard drive because you never compiled exFAT into the kernel (true story). So here's what I do: just have a smaller partition (10-15GB is plenty) with a throwaway linux install (i guess Debian for you) that I can boot into should i ever need something quick that I can't get in gentoo. This serves as a quick fix and allows me to figure out whatever I need to in gentoo and then migrate everything back to gentoo when I'm ready. I also have Windows installed for the rare moment that even linux can't solve my problem at the current moment (though so far the only time I "needed" windows was for printing at my college (even then I could just use the library's computers and just put my files on a usb stick). Lastly, with gentoo i find it very important to have a good backup system in place. There have been times when I did something stupid and wrecked my install. Luckily I have had a backup only 1 or 2 days old that I could restore to and I was back up and running within 20 minutes. If you do this, the risks of using gentoo greatly diminish especially with overlays and stuff. Also I suggest always keeping one extra kernel when upgrading. So, you have two working kernels.
+bjbboy71697 LOL @ The exFAT scenario, hahahahaha. I usually do have a backup Linux installed as well as Win 8.1 for playing Usf4ae. I rarely boot into them though ;)
***** he was talking about not being able to decicde between the two as they are both his favorites. Instead of choosing one over the other he could dual boot.
You mention compiling from source on debian (creating debs out of tarballs), do you create your own packages/write ebuilds in gentoo too? I find that the epatch mechanism and /etc/portage/patches is probably one of the most compelling features of gentoo.
What distro to use? Well, I stick with Gentoo for a couple of years now, but this is only for people who have time. So : Gentoo for those who have the time, Debian Sid for those who want to update and install packages quickly. But my favorite is definitly Gentoo, eventhough I'm running out of time
I'm a debian fan but I sometimes find myself hating it for the same reasons. For example I wanted to get the latest dev build of the Dolphin Emulator on Linux Mint 17.2 just so I'd have all the latest bells and whistles, and in order to do that I needed to backport packages from Utopic and Vivid. I never got it all done and just settled with a slightly older version of Dolphin because it worked good enough. I didn't wanna risk breaking things. I needed dependencies for dependencies for more dependencies. It was getting too complicated.
At 8:35 you, when you are talking about reusing an old config file when upgrading a kernel, Whenever I upgrade to the new mayor version say 4.5 to 4.6, if I'm in a hurry or simply don't want to mess with the kernel, I just copy the old config file, to the new tree, and run `make olddefconfig` (Takes previous options enabled and uses that, and lefts new options to the upstream default) In the real life i just run my script 'do_kernel' that takes care of doing the above, and updating the boot loader, and backing up my config file, so I can try new versions of the kernel with just two commands `eselect kernel set && do_kernel`
Have been using Debian (testing) for a while now and am happy with it, but I will install Gentoo on my Laptop for fun. If it's alright, I might even switch to G. on my Desktop.
I considered trying out Gentoo. Maybe when I'm more in a phase where I want to spend time building and making an OS work, rather than wanting to use the computer day to day...I'm probably odd in that I find Debian stable works well enough. Debian can be a rolling release also. But you have made videos on how to change the sources list. There are Debian packages that don't work at times. I had a problem with mixxx, but I can get it to run with a command I found.
I suck at Gentoo, but the HP Chromebook 11 G3 I recently got for cheap as a 2nd computer is based on Gentoo, and it runs really well for what it is. But for my other computers I'll stick with LinuxMint XFCE because it's simple, and easy to use.
Yah Gentoo! I've been using Gentoo for over a year now and I'm not ready to change it. My first install was KDE and loved it but a few months ago I bought a SSD and installed XFCE4 and works perfectly after many hours/days of compiling and so on, that I had forgotten ... the pleasure of Gentoo. About Debian, I have tried it and did not like it ... many things didn't work and couldn't find fixes and what not ...
+Linux4UnMe well kaddy, in my opinion bro. I prefer gentoo and i would say stick with it. Debian while it is beautiful and fun to work with. I've gone through distros for ages and I feel Gentoo is the one I always fall back with because i love how it works and it makes me feel at home. So I feel that from what I heard in this video..staying with Gentoo is best in this case..
The problem with Gentoo is it takes so long to install and compile. And someone who works 6 dayas a week like me don't have time to do that. A shame really cause I do like the distro.
I installed funtoo since I recently got time over the holidays. It was frustrating, yet fun! Still adding the stuff I want but everything seems to run smooth as silk.
gentoo is predominantly a server based OS..... but wonderful to use as a desktop! so much you can do!!!!! and I stress DO! put it this way, jnr dev Ops (advanced Ops)
I used to have a bunch of overlays, and yes it was a pain when they overlapped. it is better to just grab the ebuild you want, one by one, and put it/them into your own overlay. gpo.zugaina.org is an online overlay tree.
+Linux4UnMe, if you like tinkering, learning, and like standing on the precipice of software development as I do, give ZFS a try. www.funtoo.org/ZFS_Install_Guide
The problem I have with Debian is that it's not a perfect distro. Stable is the relase that breaks the least, but has the most outdated software, and backports don't always work. Not only that, but Debian developers are known for having bad practices, like: not patching things upstream and breaking OpenSSL (making millions of machines vulnerable); or taking months to fix simple bugs like the "recent" OpenCL bug which they took two months to fix (every distro except Debian got that right). Testing is a good idea, but you can be vulnerable for months. Sid lags a LOT behind Arch and breaks too much, probably because Debian is a very complex distro and have such poor development where it's thousands of developers don't test things. openSUSE has a lot of software management issues, but taking that aside it's a very professional distro with the best and smartest installer out there. I'd use it if they fixed some packages bugs like the MATE desktop not starting or KDE 5 making CPU work unusable and thus reducing performance in games or 3D applications (or any app, for that matter). Gentoo is the distro that gives the biggest control over the system. I love it! However, I don't like the idea of compiling my stuff for weeks. Arch, on the other hand, has only 30 developers, but it always work. I've been using it for more than 3 years and never had a serious issue. The only two issues I had with Arch were related to VirtualBox (easily fixable by upgrading the package from Testing) and one from LVM which was just a noisy message. Despite having only 30 developers, Arch developers actually test things before they push them out and they do it FAST and with passion, that's why Arch never breaks, even though it has 99% of the latest software. Not only that, but grsecurity support in Arch is a piece of cake, only 5 commands and you're good to go.
Linux4UnMe Didn't mean to be disrespectful, just thought I share my opinion too :( You know, there aren't many people who use Linux so it's nice to see what everyone things.
Difficulties to decide between Gentoo and Debian? Do like me and find a dirt cheap - but not too old and slow - PC in the classifieds = Problem solved. ;) Now I'm looking at 2 screens, one with Manjaro/MATE and one with Antergos/Cinnamon. The second one is my test computer as well and get's a new install every so often. And all that without having to hassle with virtual machines or risking the integrity of my productivity system.
zod is my god .fila Just a preference... I don't consider Arch to be stable, I want stable rolling and portage is vastly superior to pacman. Eg: You can pick multiple versions of a package instead of only having 1 option, you can pick what use flags you want for each package etc... I have alot more reasons... perhaps an Arch vs Gentoo video will come soon.
The one of many debian fanboys, who do not even have any clue about gentoo. Specially on Debian you need a lot of repositories to have some fancy software, and you raise a chance to broke it, but gentoo is opposite, you can't brake it like that.
