Gentoo Is No Harder Than Arch Linux??

Recently I installed Gentoo live on stream for the first time ever and doing so made me realize a lot of what I thought about this distro was actually kind of wrong, but wrong in a good way. While it's not the Linux distro for it seems like a good choice for certain kinds of people.

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==========Time Stamps==========
0:00 Introduction
0:34 Install Guide
3:13 Install Gentoo Is Easy
5:09 Customization
6:49 Compile Times
9:41 You Installed It Wrong
11:13 Is This Distro For Me?
11:36 Outro

==========Credits==========
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#Gentoo #BrodieRobertson #Linux

🎵 Ending music

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[thehien]

Curious fact: Gentoo emerges take much less time than Windows updates.

[killistan]

I think of Gentoo as a set of tools for building a custom Linux distro in a reasonable amount of time.

[taidee]

The Gentoo Handbook is going at a part that explains that a computer is, lol. I think their intention is basically teaching people about Linux.

[fuseteam]

"compiling will always take longer than installing a binary"
suckless: is that a challenge?

[almadaer]

As an old unix guy who used mandrake, ubuntu, opensuse and freebsd for a couple of months each, then switched to arch for 2 years, then switched to gentoo 9 years ago and never looked back, I can claim that gentoo is like father figure to me - it never fails to understand my needs and provides the best support for any of my endeavors whatever sick and disturbed they might be. If religious uncoditional love exists(and respect), it is the love gentoo mainteiners convey to it's users.

[robertcoyle]

Arch wiki is more like a reference guide for techs than an educational too. I installed Arch about 7 years ago and there was a beginners install guide that's no longer there. This was in the days when systemd was in its infancy and UEFI motherboards were the exception and not the rule.

This time around I'm using GPT partitioning table on a UEFI box and found myself asking a question and opening the arch wiki. next thing you know I have 5 pages open and right back where I started being even more confused than when I started and it isn't my first rodeo. It would be nigh impossible for a novice to do it.

[neilcaldwell]

Ex gentoo user now on arch, and wishing that I never changed. I changed because of the time commitment, but I find that anything I want to do something a bit off the beaten path, it is a lot more painful. One example is that I recently wanted to use some academic code to play with some bleeding edge 3D graphics research. The library required a particular implementation of a maths function. Because this implementation was faster in some cases, but not in all, it is not in the default library. I had to manage this myself, or change the code. What was in the AUR didn't work. In gentoo, whenever I had problems like that, it was either change a USE flag and do an update to fix, or just go and install the new library myself, then do an update. Because everything was compiled from source on the system, I generally had all the dependencies, instead of having to run around looking for the right devel packages.

[aoi_mizma]

EX. Gentoo user. Gentoo is definitely well documented and not really that "scary" but it does ask for more attention. Especially when you change the hardware configuration, it might take quite some time to recompile everything and update etc. That said, it's a great distro if that level of control is necessary, since the workflow for configuring and compiling is really streamlined and well documented.

Also, if you want to learn the insides of how GNU/Linux works, Gentoo is the way to go. It really teaches you all the ins and outs of Linux.

[TrowGundam]

This was basically my thoughts on Gentoo as well. The install wasn't hard, just different, but I'm not willing to make the time commitment that Gentoo requires of its users. So, I think I'll stick to Arch for now.

[nichtgestalt]

One thing I really like about Gentoo is that it teaches you many things about Gnu/Linux in general.
Also it was the exact same point I used Gentoo for a longer Period if time when I realized that the Distro really doesn't matter that much.
Kinda late though but still.

And as you said, the wiki and documentation is just awesome. You can almost anything by yourself because the wiki has it all.
Because of that Figuring stuff out in Gentoo and Arch was (for me) way easier than for example Ubuntu.

[GodIsTheReason]

I agree entirely. I wasn't very scared of gentoo after having installed arch, and it wasn't rocket science, just a bit more involved than arch.
The big dealbreaker for me is that everything has to be built from source. It's just not worth the time unless you're planning to set compiler flags to get a marginal performance gain or whatever, which realistically I don't, 99.5% of the time. Just give me the binaries, and on the off-chance that I really want a custom build of some program, I'll just write a custom PKGBUILD...
It's certainly a fun distro to play with, but I absolutely wouldn't want it for my daily driver.

[AnzanHoshinRoshi]

Thank you, Brodie. I built a Gentoo system some years ago. It took a long time but I had A KDE with Fluxbox and Awesome options that worked very well.

[Axctal]

GenToo lifehack: mount tmpfs to /var/tmp/portage/ ... now your compiler's temp space is on a "ram drive". Installing/updating packages - super profit in performance, as well as in not wearing out your SSD.

[zugzugthezuggernaut]

As for "installing Gentoo wrong", just using a default/distribution kernel is "not in the spirit" of the whole thing. Is it wrong? No way, not at all. Do you need bluetooth options and drivers for Macs or Microsoft Surfaces? You know if you need them, otherwise, disable them. That's the kernel bit.

Why use Gentoo? Does one care about a miniature sys-admin experience, about how the bits all fit together, about what it means to have a package in first place, about customization down to the init system and boot loader? Then use Gentoo. Will it be faster than a comparable Arch/etc. install? Probably not. It may well be safer/easier to harden/etc. due to smaller components with not-included features (maybe), but unless the maintainer of the system is on top of it, it's probably not going to run faster (even with -O3 and LTO flags).

Why Gentoo? Customization down to the bottom of the kernel without having to build it from scratch, but bring able to if wanted; a system out together your way; knowing somewhat better what bits and pieces got put into it because you at least had some form of a manifest when they were pulled in.

I know why my OpenRC install has systemd ebuilds installed - because certain packages require it. I know why my laptop doesn't have BT enabled down in the kernel: because I don't want it. I wanted to play with all the Lego pieces, not just a few, or even just most of them.

[Hugh_I]

I have been a Gentoo user for almost two decades, just a couple of years ago I switched my main Desktop to Arch because I needed to get work done and my crappy 4-core CPU wasn't cutting it anymore.
However since I bought my shiny new Ryzen 9, I'm itching to switch back. Pacman is a fine binary package manager, but whenever I micromanage AUR packages, rebuild things because linking dependencies broke or builds fail, I miss portage so much. Maybe it is because of years of experience with it, but of all the package managers I tried it is the most flexible most feature complete tool I came across.

[galdutro]

Gentoo was the first hard Linux I’ve installed! No… it’s not that hard! I barely had 3 months of experience with Linux and I’ve managed to do it!

[mele]

Between the Gentoo handbook and the freebsd handbook I had gotten at 4.2 release they got me trained up pretty well for *nix systems. They both are well documented and almost hold your hand when you figure out syntax and such.

[JustinLeeRimmer]

Gentoo was my first real introduction to Linux nearly 20 years ago. Following the guide and setting up my installation is what gave me such a firm understanding of Linux and how it works. It made me comfortable in the command line. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of Linux.

[lndstnder]

I think managing USE flags are the most difficult part of working with Gentoo. Not so much that it's hard, but instead experimenting with different flags is very time consuming.

[juzujuzu]

I compile EVERYTHING, I don't use any binaries. After installing everything the 1st time, then you can just do updates on the background or just run the update with & shutdown when you have done your days work. You will have paradigm shift where you start to feel differently towards installing and especially updating things. That's when Gentoo starts to be amazing. Sure if you need certain software like right now and you'll have to compile it, then it sucks, but if time is the essence, then using O1 instead of O2 could be the answer and just allow the next update cycle optimize it thoroughly.