More specifically, Portage. I know use flags and “optimization” are all the hype, but really, would the average user even see a benefit from customizing all their use flags? Especially a benefit that compensates for the constant compilation?
I installed it once to help grow my e-peen, but immediately switched back to Arch after watching my system compile.
Those who daily drive it, do compilation and use flags annoy you, and do you see any real benefit?
Well, all customizability arguments aside, there have been more than a few times I’ve looked at issues people on other distros are having, blinked, and thought, “Your package manager didn’t take care of that for you?” Portage may not be the fastest gun in the west, but it’s very good at what it does.
The main benefit to using Gentoo is having complete control over your system. I’ve been a Gentoo user for nearly 6 years so the feeling of accomplishment has worn off long ago and now I feel like I’m using any distro which is a good thing. use flags come in handy when you want to install a desktop but none of the extra crap that’s bundled with it or an application that has a feature that’s disabled by default that you want to enable. Most packages take less than a minute to compile and on the stable branch, most of the big stuff only needs to update once in a while. From an outsider it sounds tryhardy to use Gentoo but in reality I’m using Firefox or playing a game while something compiles in the background which isn’t as often as you think. I update once a week and it’s usually 4 packages that take a minute to compile.
One of the many values of GNU/Linux, and free software in general, is choice. You don’t have to use any particular distro if it doesn’t fit your use case or preferences. I don’t use Gentoo but really appreciate that it exists. If I ever wanted more control over my system, I could turn to this tried and tested distro. I am quite lazy these days and from a short period of breaking Arch, I started breaking Debian, then staying with Debian stable without breaking it and now I have moved to MX Linux, which is Debian that someone else (the MX/Antix team) have set up in the way that I want without having to install everything myself. But, yes. There is great value in Gentoo (like in Kali, Tails, Slackware, Guix, etc).
You use Gentoo if you want control and transparency. It’s great it if you are the kind of Linux user who wants things in a certain way and wants them to stay that way.
Do you want to use systemd or something else? Do you want to use pulseaudio, some other sound daemon or no sound daemon at all? X11 or Wayland? Emacs built with gtk, some other toolkit or no toolkit at all? Do you care if firefox is built with telemetry support?
If you have no opinion about this sort of stuff or your choices align well enough with a binary distribution then you are probably just as good using something else.
Real benefit. For average users it’s debatable but if you want to exclude certain components or have complex dependencies “just work” without tons of docker images or need bleeding edge performance by tweaking everything, I don’t see any other choice.
Also if you need to seamlessly integrate new projects that don’t provide packages, writing a live ebuild is straight forward and will keep updated from a regular git repo just like any other package.
Want to compile certain stuff with clang and the rest with gcc? Or use libressl instead of openssl? Stuff like that? No problem. Just be aware that you might need to file bug reports if you do exotic stuff because gentoo won’t prevent you from doing stuff nobody did before.
And installing gentoo by going through the install manual step-by-step, is certainly priceless for diving into linux under the hood. It’s a bit like a LFS but without the hassle.
I daily drove Gentoo (Funtoo actually) for a couple of years, there are things to love and things to hate in it. For me it wasn’t worth it, like you mentioned the compilation times ruined any semblance of optimisation I might had, also having to recompile the kernel because I forgot to enable joystick support was not a great experience. That being said, after the initial difficulty, Gentoo is a breeze to maintain, you have files with the packages you want, which use flags for each, etc so after it’s setup once it’s just normal upgrades. Also it allows for packages to be installed in one-shot mode, which means you’re installing it but are not sure if you’ll keep it, then you can run a command to list (and uninstall) all of them. That is one of the features I miss the most on Arch, since it allowed me to keep my system lean.
Annoy is completely the wrong term. You’re getting to control over what is to be built and what’s not, and since softwares are compiled and optimised according to my hardware, they are lighter and faster with less attack surface.
That may sound cumbersome for a novice to setup the portage configuration but in return it is really worth the time, and it is usually one time, unless you plan to add or remove features. But once you’re satisfied with your configuration, you don’t have to look back at it.
I found YouTubers complaining about going through hour long upgrade on the daily bases very misleading. Only a few core packages can take that long, which are upgraded on a quarterly bases.
Wait did you seriously called it a hype? Before switching to Gentoo, I was using Arch, softwares have better support of eachother and if feature isn’t working you can always talk with the dev how to resolve it. They might even look into modifying the ebuilds to make them compatible.
FYI, I never came across any breakage and I’ve been using Gentoo for about an year now.
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Well yeah it pisses them off because they’re here to read people talk about their experiences and give opinions, not for someone to paste ChatGPT output. If they wanted that they could’ve just used ChatGPT themselves.
It seems like you’re well aware people are annoyed by it but do it anyways. Why?
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You said “100% ChatGPT” initially which gives off a different impression than “I just have a writers assistant”. People are gonna read that and assume it means you’re just asking ChatGPT about it and pasting what it said rather than conveying your own opinion.
And saying “I love how it pisses you off” bothers me. It makes it sound like you relish in the way that it’s annoying to people and have that as a reason for using it.
As someone who has daily driven gentoo in the past, I didn’t see much benefit to compiling everything over my previous arch install. It was a mess to keep up long term and wasted a lot of power unnecessarily. I’m way more happy on fedora now.
Not a fan of how the OP’s written but whatever.
Like any distro, it’s for who it’s for and if you don’t like it then feel free to distro hop until you find one you do. Why is the “average user” trying to use a “hard distro” anyway? Seems like the “average user” is increasingly “some rando who just wants to use their computer” so yeah, I’d say it’s pretty useless for someone who has no use for it. I suppose it’s more of an “if you don’t know why you want it then it’s probably not going to help you” sort of thing. I like that it lets me set things up my way then mostly just goes away until I want it for something. Other people like software that holds their hand or handles a bunch of things for them. It’s fine, not everything must be for everyone.
You successfully evaded the actual question: what is the point of Gentoo.
Gentoo doesn’t hold your hands, but that doesn’t mean that it has a purpose for even the most enthusiastic users.
There might have been a time when compiling your own software was an actual benefit, but those days are long gone. When you’re using Gentoo today it’s either a hobby on its own (which is fine, but per definition pointless) or it’s a flex (which is not so fine).
First off, I take issue with the idea that hobbies are pointless. If doing something makes you happy, that’s worth a lot in my book: whether that hobby is playing golf or collecting stamps or using a non-mainstream distro.
To the point: for me, Gentoo has a purpose in that it’s the easiest distro for me to maintain. Yeah, I had to negotiate the learning curve, but now that I have I know how to keep my install running and fix things when they break. Before my last computer died I was running the same install for 9 years straight, and my current install on my “new” computer is five years old. I never got that feeling of “system mastery” with Ubuntu or Fedora.
So there’s your purpose: it works better for some people than other distros. Everybody has their own preferences and values, and Gentoo matches those for some. It may not be your cup of tea, but that doesn’t mean that everybody should just use what you consider to be a “useful” distro.
If you have lots of free time…? Nah, not really.
t. tried Gentoo once, noticed it took over 7 hours to compile a kernel (on a “HIGH-END gaming rig”) – noped the eff out of it instantly.
It doesnt take 7 hours on my 6 year old laptop. Did you ran make with j16 or however many cores you have?
