The Reason I Use Gentoo

# The gentoo handbook
# gentoo USE flags

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[smolbirb]

I absolutely love people talking about Gentoo, there is not near enough content out about it rn

[SweDennis]

Hi Josh. I'm a Gentoo user since 2004 when DRobbins was still around, and I thought to comment Before I've even seen your video ... Gentoo was my first ever foray into the world of Linux. I installed it, or tried to, perhaps 3 or 4 times before I even got a working system. At that time as soon as I thought that I had done something not "Exactly right to get the full performance out of my system", I re-did the whole thing. Over time things settled down, and each and every month and year, my system became more and more like a pair of ever so comfy shoes, the darn thing just works, with No issues whatsoever.
Having seen a million memes of how Gentoo users want to re-compile everything to gain the last micro cycle of performance, Or, memes saying how Difficult it is to install, none of which is the pont, I've settled on the fact that those who say that don't grasp the essence of the OS. Gentoo, for Me, is all about stability. I run XFCE since forever, I want to get work done, I couldn't care less about what my desktop looks like, the computer is not a hobby in and of itself, it used to be, but not now. With every emerge -DuvaN @world I run, I scrutinize the USE flags, same for new installs, and if there's Anything I can remove, it's gone, I can always re-add it as it's needed. I see it as "Every line of code complied, is a potential bug, so the less you include, the better." This has served me well. As for compile times ... Meh, leave it over night if need be, and as for compiling the kernel ... know your hardware, and use the targets in the make file, using localmodconfig, yes2modconfig and what not, it's almost trivial to get a custom kernel that screems. My kernel compiles in 13 minutes on an old I3, and I didn't have to work for it at all, using the provided targets in the make file. Gentoo is all about control, for me, keeping the beast at bay ... I also remember your excellent video about rolling releases, where you pointed out that rolling release don't mean bleeding edge, it's just a means of distribution, a most excellent point, and well put. If you ever feel the need to nerd-out on Gentoo, ping @chaustemplea on Matt's discord, that is me, and with that, I'm off to watch your video. 😀

[rexempire]

Note: Gentoo's Firefox has hardware acceleration enabled out of the box. The "hwaccel" flag actually force enables hardware acceleration (most people wont need this flag enabled).

[garciajero]

there's a slight but very noticeable delay in the audio . Clearly this has been recorded in gentoo

[rodrigosouto]

Very fair points. I've used Gentoo for years.

But my old notebook was suffering too much because of huge compile times. And I live in Brazil, a very hot place, so my lap would receive additional heat and maybe overheat.

I lost it after a 3 days compilation (it was compiling tensorflow I think). But someday I'll come back to Gentoo.

[BanduTheGreat]

From all of the Gentoo videos I have seen, you have presented the very best argument towards using and learning this distro. Your point has been made. Well presented.

[AK-fuij]

Your explanation of use flags sold me on gentoo, thank you.

[Buorgenhaeren]

Extremely powerful gentoo user phenotype

[tylerdean]

I run gentoo because red star OS isn’t up to date

[deadeyecowkillz]

mans built like trevor phillips if he didn't have a business

[HowToLinux]

I would argue, you learn Linux by installing Arch or Gentoo. If you try to understand the commands you are executing, you learn how to partition a disk, file systems bootloaders, etc. You forget one package and notice that you don't have bluetooth. So you can learn some of Linux by manuallt installing a system like Arch, Gentoo or even Debian with debootstrap.

[zeckma]

This is actually very similar to the reasons why I use LFS and have been for a year. I just found that Gentoo got in my way a lot and didn't offer as much control as you could have, while following LFS without a package manager but yourself allows for absolute and total control, from custom prefixes, applying custom patches, do things in a very strange way that works for you that Gentoo never could, being able to set every configure option for each package as you which, and so on. The last reason is that whenever I compile things myself, I feel most comfortable and know my hand isn't being held and I know exactly why things are happening and what... except when gtk stuff wants libs in /usr/lib64 instead of /usr/lib, which makes absolutely no sense lol. Either way, great explanation!

[Vanuatoo]

I started using linux in 2000. My first experience was with RedHat but it was Gentoo that taught me how Linux works during the installation. For instance it teaches networking basics during network configuration. I even managed to compile Kernel, remember compiled SATA driver as a module and OS would not boot up, but then you bootstrap and just continue fixing. Still remember the excitement after 3 days of reading, configuring and compiling (Hardware was slow :)) when boot screen showed green OKs

[cartib]

Haven’t installed a single Linux distribution, yet I thoroughly enjoyed listening to your thoughts and reasons. Thank you!

[oglothenerd]

Gentoo is pretty cool, but being a 14 year old with Autism and possibly ADHD, I don't have the patience to install stuff from source.

[marekmatej]

I love Gentoo, but last years I'm using the Calculate-Linux and I very happy with it - The Install time is magnitude lower compare to pure Gentoo, while using it is exactly the same as pure Gentoo.

[nickbernstein]

I think all these arguments are great, but the mess that's caused by three different parties (kernel team, distro staff, and app developers) causing a mess with libraries sill makes me prefer "gen one" aka, freebsd. That said, gentoo is amazing if you need slightly better hardware support.

[hopelessdecoy]

I have a hard time saying any OS is the "best". it is too heavily dependent on use case. Gentoo is real cool, kinda like how NixOS is real cool. However I just don't want to use them, I don't like chasing problems with my OS and configurations and a lot of people feel the same. I'm glad they exist though because there are people who love them and that is what Linux is about.

I have tried Kubuntu, Fedora, Debian and Linux Mint and honestly I have come to stick with Mint. It just works and with a little elbow grease you can customize it pretty well both software and visuals wise. Cinnamon doesn't break as much as KDE, I install things from source, store and repo and I dive into the configs of stuff but at the same time started with an amazingly stable full featured OS with no work. I have wanted to in a VM do LFS just to say I did it though :)

[mementomori]

Im impressed you have time to record this video betwean compilations...

[MasterGxt]

Alright I'm sold, I'm installing Gentoo as my next distro