• kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    6 minutes ago

    I tried it for a bit – it is similar to freebsd in terms of the package install process.

  • dethmetaljeff@lemmy.world
    4·
    5 hours ago

    I used Gentoo for ages… it was the only distro I’d consider for my personal projects. Eventually, the amount of time it took to compile packages wore me out and I switched to fedora. Maybe I’m just old but watching gcc fly by for hours on end to compile X11 was neat but is not how I want to spend my Saturday anymore. Maybe I’ll build out a VM for old times sake…

      • dethmetaljeff@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 hour ago

        defeats the purpose? Also, like I mentioned, I used it ages ago…binary packages when I was using it weren’t very common. I see they “went binary” a few years back… but then, why bother with Gentoo?

  • ter_maxima@jlai.lu
    4·
    14 hours ago

    It sounds like a cool distro but I don’t see any advantages compared to NixOS, aside from maybe the option to make it more minimal for constrained environments.

    • kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1·
      7 minutes ago

      Completely different – nixos is about repeatability, while Gentoo is about build optimization, customization, and performance.

    • Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      6 hours ago

      it’s a lot less scuffed in some ways while still giving you a lot of control and a lot of tools for declarative system management. it’s also waaay better documented. it’s comfy.

  • banazir@lemmy.ml
    7·
    20 hours ago

    Gentoo is great. I used it for a few years 20 years ago and I still think the package manager is the best I’ve ever used. I wouldn’t use Gentoo today, but I’m really glad I went through the install and maintenance process. It didn’t make me a guru, but I did learn a thing or two about Linux.

  • tuckerm@feddit.onlineEnglish
    6·
    22 hours ago

    I have a soft spot for Gentoo, even though I haven’t used it in years. It was one of my first experiences with Linux, since it was installed in one of the computer labs in college. I just remember that the windows had this physics jiggle effect when you dragged them around. I was so surprised that Linux had a more “fun” aesthetic than Mac or Windows did.

    • AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 hour ago

      The “fun” aspect was what drew me to BeOS when it was near its heyday. What that thing would do in comparison to Winbloze at the time and the user experience in general was astonishingly more pleasant.

      I remember their simple web server called Diner I had a website hosted on an older machine running Diner in my lab and it was just always on and when my office got DSL I felt like a king having that site up and accessible from anywhere, knowing it was on a box in my office and running Diner on BeOS.

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 day ago

    Me too!

    I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I’m happy I did.

    Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My “primary box” is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I’m sleeping. Can’t have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can’t compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I’m awake in a given day. (And I’d prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      2·
      18 hours ago

      Interested in why you went back to Gentoo after Arch.

      I use Arch (btw) and tried Gentoo back in the day, but it’s always in the back of my mind that compiling source could be “better”…?

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        So, I’ve been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some “desktop systems” as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It’s wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and offer beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

        So, I’ve been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi’s to something that doesn’t depend so much on some “project” out there to be able to continue to use.

        The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn’t, it’d be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

        Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi – it’s an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

        Aside from that, there’s SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn’t really feel “ready for prime time”. It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

        Plus, I do kindof like the idea of “more control over my system(s)”. Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it’s much less “in the spirit of” Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don’t need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

        Anyway, those are my main reasons.

      • Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
        1·
        6 hours ago

        gentoo is less about compiling from source (I mean it can be about that too) and more about having a lot of choice and really nice tooling. it’s in some ways a bunch more stable and declarative than arch. packaging your own stuff is even easier and you can just have most packages be stable while only running unstable version of the packages you explicitly care about :)

      • Broken@lemmy.ml
        3·
        21 hours ago

        Damn, it looked like candy to me too until I read your comment. Now all I see is candy guitar pick.

            • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
              1·
              1 hour ago

              Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

              You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

              When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.

          • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
            2·
            15 hours ago

            That would make a huge difference.

            I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.

            Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.

            Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.