Good for installing on old computers that could use the boost Gentoo provides
On newer machines the speed difference compiled packages provide is basically negligible, you'd honestly be better off sticking to Arch and not deal with the installation and compiling times
Is Gentoo Worth Using Anymore?
Wyatt Garcia
Lincoln Cox
> Maybe when I know I won't be busy I'll go back to gentoo for the hell of it.
You could just as well compile everything you probably need from arch before you even switch your live system back. Portage can do its compiles and installs just fine in a chroot.
Lucas Diaz
> Good for installing on old computers that could use the boost Gentoo provides
Gentoo doesn't generally provide a boost.
It provides sysadmin flexibility and tinkering capabilities and so on, but it's not "faster" as such.
Hunter Robinson
Unless you really, REALLY care about optimizing your system to the absolute fullest, then don't bother. The only features Gentoo provides are ones that spend lots of your precious time and energy making your system as fast and unbloated as possible. Downloading a package any bigger than 80mb from portage is a fucking nightmare.
That, and if you don't have an autistically detailed knowledge of everything your kernel does and does not need, then you'll most likely end up breaking your system in one way or another anyway. You're better off sticking with what you like, unless this soemhow sounds appealing to you.
Isaiah Diaz
No, the source code package manager is for working with source code. Portage supports almost everything you could do with regards to running source code that needs to be compiled first (be it because it has your patches, because you have a compiler extension, because you are using a different libc, because you want a few dozen packages installed daily from a developer git repository, because... whatever else).
> Downloading a package any bigger than 80mb from portage is a fucking nightmare.
Absolutely untrue. The Portage mirrors are often really quite fast and so is usually the fallback upstream repository.
Nor does 80MB mean a recent computer will spend a lot of time extracting and compiling.
> That, and if you don't have an autistically detailed knowledge of everything your kernel does and does not need
Not fucking needed. You can take whatever functioning configuration you had before on the predecessor distro and continue from that. Or you can use Linux tools to trivially find out what you need.
If you had no predecessor distros and it's your first time on Linux, you can just use the configuration from whatever Live DVD that evidently worked to install Gentoo, or have genkernel provide you a default config.
Of course, you're not going to live well on Gentoo if you think using some (pretty good) CLI utilities is a "nightmare". But then I also can't imagine what the fuck I'd expect you to do with source code on a sysadmin or even programmer level, because they both include massive amounts of this "nightmare" or comparable learning.
Isaiah Bailey
I like the concept of Gentoo, but in reality, the compile time still takes a long time. When I install a package, I install it because I need it that instant.
Henry Russell
I installed it because of OpenRC. Majority of non systemd distros are memes (like void), and I don't want anything Debian based (devuan), and slackware is too out of date. After using Gentoo I came to the conclusion that it's a fantastic distribution
David Walker
I was about to switch to void why is it a meme?
Jaxson Long
It's abandonware with almost no packages. Apart from no systemd, it has all the downsides of arch with none of the advantages.
Ryder Hughes