Hi, i am thinking of switching to gentoo, and wanted to ask if its a good idea. Anything i should look out for?
Btw im coming Form arch
Thx :3
I used Gentoo for a few years. I don’t recommend it at all!
first off, there are no tangible advantages. it’s not faster. it is more customizable (by use flags), but the only tangible advantage of those is bragging rights saying you kept a certain library off your system and saved 100kb. just enabling all features is more practical.
there are tangible disadvantages. a big system upgrade can take days. and often fails. and, the manual time you spend merging config files with dispatch-config is large.
I switched from Gentoo to debian after 3y of using Gentoo. i switched from debian to arch after about 10y later. been on arch for about 6y now. would not recommend Gentoo
Those things you listed are part of the fact, not all. Like saving 100kB. It does not matter in your 1TB hard drive, but it’s night and day in embedded systems. No benefit for you isn’t the same to no benefit.
the 100kb u save from the right use flags is nullified by the hundreds of mb needed to have the entire build tool chain on your system. there are dedicated distros for embedded systems that are much better suited. like alpine Linux. or LFS. (IIRC with LFS u can get the entire system installed 2 or 3 MB)
I mean, you can cross-compile to generate a Gentoo rootfs for the embedded system.
I worked on embedded systems for audio devices. I of course endorsed Alpine as well, but with musl as the C library I got weird bugs of stuttering audio output.
With Gentoo I get the option to build my entire system with musl as well, but I would rather have that bug not in my system. That’s what Gentoo offers: options.
By “LFS”, I think you mean Buildroot, practically. Buildroot is also highly customisable, but Buildroot isn’t a distro. Like LFS, there is no way yo update a system, only rebuilding with latest packages. It also does not have flags for the whole system, so you’re on your own if you want to disable, say IPv6, in the whole system.
Would be helpful hearing about WHY you want to switch if you’re already happy.
Im not, arch is a nightmare for me. I try to installiert something over pacman: ERROR. I try to fix the error, doesnt work because it needs certain shared library files… That i can not find.
But thats not the only thing, somehow the Servers are allways down and its not a nice little challange anymore. More like a piece of code designed to make me miserable.
I hope thats different in gentoo :)
Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.
I’m sorry for being blunt, but Arch is very easy and plug-and-play like, if you’re having these sorts of issues my guess is that you’re not familiar with Linux and are doing stuff “wrong” (e.g. installing drivers from a website). Gentoo is a LOT more complicated and will hold your hand a lot less than Arch, I recommend you try something more beginning friendly like Mint, Fedora or Bazzite, learn the basics, learn the “Linux way” of doing stuff, then try Arch again, then, when you have a better reason than because I broke it, you can try Gentoo.
This is not a “you’re too dumb to do it” answer, but imagine someone who’s having issues driving a shift stick car asking how it’s like to rebuild the engine. You’re capable of rebuilding the engine yourself, you’re able to use Gentoo, just not now, learn to walk before you try to bungee jump.
What the FUCK? are you saying i should switch from an os i can customize to a god damn terrabyte oft blaot? I know that i COULD fix it. I know how. But i just want an os i can tell what to do and then it does that, and ONLY THAT
Why do you think Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora/Bazzite are not that though? It seems you don’t know how to ask your system to do stuff because otherwise your Arch install wouldn’t break. Plus I bet that the default installation of any of those distros occupies around the same disk space than what you have now.
Honestly you read like an angsty teen who read Arch is advanced and wants to be 1337 by using it, a few years back you would have been using Kali. Let me tell you a secret, Arch is not advanced, it’s a very easy straightforward distro, it just starts from a mostly clean slate, but if you’re using gnome/kde/cinnamon or any DE that distros come prepacked with its just as bloated with extra steps.
I know, that arch isnt hard, its too easy. I installed Linux to challenge myself. Arch WAS a callange. Now i want something New. And harder.
Btw. You can choose what bloat you want to have in your system (only DE vor goodies too)
It’s easy but at the same time your system is always broke? Either you were lying there or are now.
Btw. You can choose what bloat you want to have in your system (only DE vor goodies too)
Precisely my point, you keep mentioning Arch as being Bloat free and complaining that Fedora or others are bloated.
Fedora comes preinstalled with Software i dont need, arch too. At least some.
sounds like you might need to run reflector, and then update all packages
Well, to be honest, you’re choosing the two most difficult distros to manage.
It sounds like you’re kind of new to the area…why not just use Fedora?
Because i want a callange, and not a big pile oft bloat
That’s…an opinion that is not backed by any facts at all. What in the world are you talking about with “bloat” 🤣
So you’re a newbie, and making lots of wild claims and taking awfully opinionated positions in this thread all over the place. I don’t think you want help, so just be on your way 👍
Why do i need bluetooth compatibility if i dont usw it, why wifi?
If i dont want help, why would i ask?
Because they occupy so small disk size that they don’t matter and it’s easier to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I wouldn’t call hardware support bloat ware.
Also, just so you know, Arch has Bluetooth and wifi compatibility even if you don’t install the packages, Gentoo does not. You would need to recompile your kernel with the correct configuration to enable those for your specific card.
Arch is just as bloated as Fedora, Mint or Bazzite. Hell, my Arch is a lot more bloated than any of those. This is Linux, the system is as bloated as you want it to be, but also having stuff installed doesn’t necessarily causes your computer to be slow, programs only execute when you tell them to.
Bluetooth is a fucking security risk, wifi too.
I dont care how bloated your os is. Also BLAOT IS WHY IM SWITCHING
Do you know about limited disk space? Cuz that doesnt seem to be a problem for you, maybe it is for tho? Who knows?
If I could give only one reason to use Gentoo, it would be the community.
Anyway, if you choose this route, read the handbook through like a book first. Get an idea what you want your endpoint to be, then start.
Its fun to learn how the system works, but after the 4-5th time trying to install something real quick, and there’s an error in your package.use or something, it gets a lot less fun.
If you have the time and patience, its really cool. But I just want a web browser without having to edit 3+ text files to allow it to work.
Are you looking to learn linux more or have a easy living experience, or what is the goal? If you want to get to know linux, learn how to compile a kernel, make your own initramfs and such, then: absolutely! If you want a stable easily maintainable system, then… maybe not. Like it is possible, and Gentoo is very stable, but if you are just starting, then you may make choices that do break when you upgrade. With some experience, this will go away, but expect some downtime in the beginning.
I want a learning experience and a challenge. And customise EVERYTHING!
Then go for it! Gentoo is a wonderful option for that goal.
I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.
Yes. Gentoo is always a good idea :)
All Gentoo users remember the pain of compiling QtWebEngine ;)
I used to run Gentoo on my old computer. Installing it was quite the experience. That was where I learnt about most of how Linux works thanks to the wiki.
I heard compiling your own packages with use flags can improve performance, but honestly it was not worth it for the compile time.
When I switched to my new PC, the Nvidia GPU doesn’t work and I could not figure out why. I also don’t have the time at that moment so I installed Endeavour instead, which I’m still using.
Nowadays the worst thing appears to be compiling chromium with X and Wayland support.
Who needs chrome?
Well, I just wanted it as a secondary browser when troubleshooting firefox.
Seeing how you take great pride in mentioning the distro you use (by the way) I fully recommend using Gentoo so you can one-up those Arch peasants. That is about all the practical use you’re going to get out of it though.
Not bad actually, but enable binary packages to speed up compilation.
