Gentoo Linux: How Hard Can It Be!?

Torturing myself with Gentoo Linux over the weekend.

Personal gears:

Youtube
DorianDotSlash
Mental Outlaw

Timecode:
0:00 - Intro
0:18 - Gentoo Installation process, and how it is different from other distributions
1:38 - The issues I ran into
4:05 - Lesson #1 Patience is a Virtue
4:58 - Lesson #2 Turn your phone while reading
5:41 - Lesson #3 Don't overeat
6:37 - Lesson #4 Virtual Machine is your best friend
7:05 - Helpful Youtube tutorials on Gentoo Linux

[brutester]

I am using Gentoo for more than 18 years. My latest build on a 5950x got ready in less than 2 hours with Gnome. I agree the learning curve is very steep, but then at the end of the day - you actually learn. You will never get to understand the different packages and how they go into the Linux ecosystem if only using "apt get". And the hardest part is that you actually need to make decisions, like "pulseaudio or pipewire for sound?" "gnome or KDE or xfce or else?", etc... And once your system is up and running, you continue learning when making changes... I can agree, that it isn't for everyone. Gentoo is only for hardcore nerds eager to learn and thinker.

[NnotKnott]

Lmao he fell for the meme
/g/ drives another man into madness yet again.

[asdfdsasda]

Cool stuff. I tried to install gentoo few months ago on a virtualbox vm and after few days I gave up. Everything worked fine accept for X and my dwm couldn't start. I'm pretty sure I made an issue with choosing the right graphics driver support in manual kernel. There just wasn't enough documentation on what to choose when you do that in a vm instead of real hardware where you just choose your graphics card - intel, amd and nvidia. These also had documentation unlike the vm driver (or I was too stupid to find it). I think I might try to install it on my other machine when I have some spare time.

[denissetiawan]

Rather than jumping into Gentoo, it's preferable to try LFS first.

[snipzmattio]

Couldn't agree more. This is the gentoo experience

[yuto]

First tried gentoo in Virtualbox, failed. Installed it on an old laptop using the 'Linux Mint' method cuz' it's much easier and faster that way. Now I'm installing Kde Plasma and getting ready for customizing it, it's a big dose of dopamine once you screenfetch or neofetch at the CLI. It's a pretty good feeling. Also this might be the distro that I'm going to stick unto for a while. Used other distros, but it's not made for my expectations. I personally like complexity rather than simplicity.

[johnpapa]

The reason we use it is if something breaks we can actually do something for it. And thats learning works!

[CWunderA]

As someone considering taking the plunge myself, this was very useful!

[alexal]

Also on virtual machine you can create snapshot before going further and return back in a second if something went wrong.
Started with Gentoo 2 month ago, have it on VMware workstation as a guest with dwm. Can not be happier.

[unaffiliated.]

I successfully set up gentoo after a month in Linux. Didn’t even use a desktop environment, tiling window manager all the way. After a few weeks of messing around I finally got everything how I wanted, then grub stopped working for some reason

[pauldufresne]

Youtube seems to erase comments that contains links that do not point to a Youtube video... will try to adapt myself to this.

[SuperPukebucket]

Yeah, the first gentoo install is always uh, real difficult. Especially if you don't have a lot of CPU power for compiling. The gentoo discord also definitely does not recommend compiling your own kernel. Gen-kernel or a distribution kernel is recommended.

About the phone for the wiki. My recommendation is to use a live boot USB from a different distribution with a gui so you can have a console open alongside the handbook

[JamesSmith-ixjd]

I tried gentoo on my 4th year of linux, if I'm not mistaking the first install was successful, I don't remember if it was genkernel or not, my second install certainly was custom kernel and it took some time to chisel my kernel to my hardware, but it was always bootable. I then started doing my encrypted setup with usb key as a decryption key for boot (everything needed to boot the system was on that usb, the usb itself was also encrypted, everything else on the machine was also encrypted), it took about 2 weeks to setup everything this way.

[victorjoseph]

you are a very persistant person. I could not do all what you have done. wow thumbs up to you good job

[UntrackedEndorphins]

Honestly the only reason to use gentoo, is to learn about things work behind the curtain. Because otherwise it's just a distro to work on, rather than a distro to get work done.

[blank-mqef]

for gentoo installation theres an even better way than vm imo, install it on a separate drive and then move the drive into whatever you plan to install gentoo on

[nin]

Are there any general benchmarks and/or videos that capture the performance gains that come with using a customized Gentoo installation compared to other Linux operating systems?

[heikkikniivila]

I found this:
emerge -avuDU --backtrack=120 --verbose-conflicts @world
and i have no more problems with Gentoo upgrades

[anikbiswasarnob]

Hey, you can just install gentoo without the official iso brother. You don't need to use a phone to read the handbook just use a live usb of any linux distro with a browser and give it a shot.

[biutifo]

Besides it took me 2h to install Gnome, another 2h on rust and another 1h on kernel, Gentoo is optimal for me