Gentoo first impressions - What I liked, but why I won't switch. 

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Gentoo is an interesting distro.

@@JakeLinuxGentoo is excellent bistro for learning because I am using Gentoo about half a year now and everyday I need to learnd something new to make system work. However, it is not for everyone. Have a great time with linux.

Yeah, that was a poor choice of words, I was just meaning I installed as I would any other distro and did not use one of the main features of Gentoo (use flags).

Bedrock Linux?

@VollkinSea I'm looking forward to trying bedrock at some point.

Debian has apt pinning. But it is kind of frowned upon

I still want to spend a little more time in Gentoo, just can't find the time at the moment.

@@JakeLinux I still think about it from time to time, it is really an OS that makes you feel like you are just a little bit smarter just by using it. And in a way you are, because you probably get a better education on how the underlying linux fundamentals work there or if you go the LFS route. I'm also thinking of trying nix, it fits my tinkering spirit too, but... I keep thinking why should I do that when I have something that works. The lure of frustration... :)

It is definitely not for everyone, you have to want to do it and put in the work, that's for sure.

I'm not sure Gentoo would be my back up, probably artix or nixos if I had to choose right now.

@@JakeLinux NixOS could be, but I prefer non SystemD inits. I used Artix, but will pass on that one.

​@@andbenn i think nix is can be used with different init

@@momomaniac1234 I don't see my first reply. NixOS can't support other inits, see gihub issue 24346. Nix (pkg mgr) can - I think it just needs it's daemon/service to be started.

@@andbenn Gentoo actually uses OpenRC as its init system natively though you can set it up with systemd. The handbook has a whole section on this with a discussion on making the choice.

That is what I'm thinking, more work, not enough reward for that work, my void system works perfectly without going through the compilation of everything, just install and go.

You will not succeed the first time with Gentoo - take it from a 20 year veteran. You have to patient and have to be prepared to fault find your systems, particularly in the early days. I also tell anyone venturing into Gentoo for the first time to always do it on a PC or device (e.g. Raspberry Pi or other SBC) that you can afford to be offline for a while - it is no good trying to install it on your main PC that you also use for gaming, productivity, etc. etc. Gentoo can be made to run on "any old piece of cr*p" so the best thing to do is to find an old computer from somewhere and build it on that. You can leave it in a corner compiling away to itself and just go back to it to enter a new command when it needs to do the next thing, whilst not affecting your main computing environment.

It's not a "it just works" kind of thing if this is what you were looking for. Those are ready built distros who made most decisions for you. Gentoo is build it yourself. It's really good if you either have specific requirements, or if you just wanna learn all about Linux.

That's what I keep hearing, but I'm not sure that is going to change my mind, my programs work just fine when installed on void without compiling them and setting flags so not sure all the extra work is going to make it worthwhile for me.

@@JakeLinux Gentoo runs on "any old piece of cr*p" and if you end up running it on 20 year old Pentium III laptops with 512MB RAM, for example, then optimisation flags become important. Don't get me wrong, a lot of people don't understand why people like me are so into old hardware (I repair, renovate and collect old IBM and Lenovo Thinkpads, for example) and more power to them - but then they are not the type of people needing to consider using Gentoo anyway. It pleases me greatly that because I use "lite" Linux builds even on the most powerful hardware I own, the fact is that on anything from a Raspberry Pi Zero though to a multi-CPU Xeon server, I can run the same Gentoo environment across all of them.

Nice, thanks for sharing, I plan on giving Gentoo a go on hardware at some point, and I will get a little deeper than I did in this instance and hopefully get the whole picture on Gentoo.

I was not meaning to imply that there is a specific way to install Gentoo, just that I did not utilize all that Gentoo can do, I just installed things genetically and did not attempt to specify flags. And no it is not a fedora video.

@@JakeLinux then you used and installed Gentoo going the Gentoo way

I agree, that is my whole experience with it so far. Not much gain for all that work

@@binladen-ci7jm All this system "efficency" you're talking about is only usefull with embbeded systems and specific server farm. Modern home hardware don't care about a few hundred MB of RAM. Humans don't care about 0,001 second gain from program starting (unless OCD off course) Time-wise and brain cycles-wise Gentoo efficiency tranform into MASSIVE inefficiency. For security, the improvement is far from massive, especially since most of the hardened toolchain have been adopted by most distros. That's why most security firms that care and know about security don't even bother with Gentoo : too much time hassle for very little gain.

@@binladen-ci7jm As a side note : SLOC is a VERY bad metric for security. Low SLOC can be less secure if it's not maintained, or coded with shitty abstractions everwhere.

Had I known, I would not have

If I were to guess, especially since he mentioned that he used no USE flags and stuff, that is was done using a single core. Which is indeed very time consuming.

Still running it?

I get the stability aspect, I find that to be the most important aspect of any distro, is it stable, I have had zero issues with void over the past year, which is why I have found no reason to leave, if things change I think Gentoo may possibly be a good fit, I just have to play around with it a little more and see for sure. Thanks ks for sharing your thoughts.

@@JakeLinux I've been using Gentoo as my main (and usually only) distro for 20 years now and for me personally it's the best distro out there. But if Void works for you or Ubuntu or Mint works for others, then more power to you - Linux is ultimately about choice.

I have a big soft spot for mint, it was my first distro and it was a great transition distro from Windows. I also love the cinnamon desktop.

On the host it is dwm, on the guest it is herbstluftwm

Arch is bare bone, you either need to already be experienced or willing to learn by reading the wiki, it's been my first distro after a year of Ubuntu based ones personally

Try Slackware

@@heroe1486 I know I use it for one year with KDE and it was good but not better than Fedora

@@momomaniac1234 I'm a gamer so Slackware is out of the question but it possibly I will try it on my old laptop

Interesting, never heard of it

TY

What did you say?

N Korea is a free land compared to RU-vid, even putting bunches of "*" in every """controversial""" word doesn't help sometimes

Praise God, brother! We may not take the same stance on tattoos, but I hope we agree that salvation only comes through Jesus Christ alone by His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection.

My launcher script?