Installing gentoo is easy. Compile time isn't a big deal. The real thing that ends up killing you? Identifying and configuring EVERY SINGLE MINOR ASPECT OF THE SYSTEM in order to get a baseline desktop experience.
Everything from automatically connecting to a network after plugging in to enabling sleep and hibernate to having the ability to swap audio devices, you've got to remember to do it and then get it working.
And you'll never actually be done, because a week later you'll need to do some basic task like use the 4th button on your mouse, realize it's not working, and then stop your work and go fix it.
After you've done it once and saved all the config files you never have to do it again. Also using a DE like XFCE, KDE will massively cut down the amount of time you need to spend customizing buttons and inputs. Networking could be as easy as installing Network Manager but wpa_supplicant/dhcpcd is fine and really doesn't require much setup if you know what you're doing. Again, Pulseaudio would make audio setup fairly trivial. I personally found portage much more confusing when I started using Gentoo because I wasn't used to having that kind of granular control over packages.
got to say I agree with this. I started using Gentoo in 2003 and I used it for a number of years.
I tried it again in a VM last month, still have the image of it handy if I need it. Quickly noticed that if I clicked Power down in QEMU nothing happened because .. nothing handled that. Of course it's a matter of installing acpid and now you have something that handles the power button - and you can as OP says go on and configure and fix every little thing and get a "perfect" distribution. But hell no, I'm not spending a month configuring and compiling and tinkering when I can just use _any_ modern distribution.
Looking back.. first redhat release I used required you to choose network card and audio card and configure those correctly and so on. Gentoo wasn't really special in requiring some configuration in it's early days. But now? Just burn a Ubuntu or Fedora or Debian live-cd and click install and you're done.
Josiah Cooper
I use a git repo to back them up. ── dotfiles ── .bashrc ── .emacs.d ── init.el ── .gitignore_global ── .gnus ── .vimrc ── .xinitrc ── etc ── local.d ── wpa.start ── portage ── make.conf ── package.accept_keywords ── package.use ── savedconfig ── x11-wm ── dwm-6.1-r1 ── usr ── src ── linux ── .config ── var ── lib ── portage ── world
Adrian Gutierrez
I started installing Gentoo for the first time today & the only thing what is confusing is Portage.. is the Gentoo handbook helpful?
Lincoln Sanchez
Portage is very confusing to begin with. Handbook is excellent but #gentoo irc channels on freenode are also very helpful.
Blake Walker
How do i force a fsck on boot if i cant mount rw (orphaned inodes)? I wrote a script but it would be much better if it just ran on boot
i use gentoo with 16gb ram. bash 5.0.4 kernel 5.0.5
Mason Phillips
That script builds the toolchain and portage, after that you emerge -e @system (or @world) to rebuild everything with the toolchain you just built. Or are you building for a different system or architecture?
Nathan Ramirez
You have to configure extra mouse buttons in every distro, though. In fact, you have to configure everything yourself. Want proprietary drivers for nvidia? fire up that proprietary firmware applet and find the right one, oh it's two years outdated? Gonna find that repo from hans bindekrieger and hope your distro is still supported. What's this, that steam package from the store isn't working? Have to uninstall and do it manually through the command line to get the non store version.
My experience with ubuntu was less than stellar. I had an easier time with gentoo and arch. Once you have done something you never have to deal with that shit again unlike all other distros that force you uninstall and reconfigure shit every time a new distro upgrade is in the door. FUCK THAT SHIT.
"User friendly" my ass.
Oliver Price
That script would be useful if I were starting from a stage tar or modifying the current running installation and swapping it's toolchain into another (?), but what I am looking to do is install a new system with completelly different toolchain onto a empty partition. Cross building should do the trick
Brandon Morales
You can just follow the handbook for that. Extract stage3 to the partition and chroot
Angel Sanders
There are no stage3 for what I'm looking for
Ian Martin
Gentoo isn't any harder to setup than Arch or Debian minimal. Get good at *nix and you wouldn't have this problem.
>installing networkmanager is hard >selecting a desktop profile if you want desktop features is hard If you want solutions that just work then you have3 to use the right tools
Easiest distro I've ever used that's let me patch pretty much every bit of software installed and keep everything manageable when upgrades come along.
Justin Nguyen
if you use genkernel everything literally just works plug and play. I could fucking care less about compiling my own kernel. stop making everything harder for yourself and realize how easy it really is
Joshua Clark
>Installing gentoo is easy >BUT >blablablabla xyz Not so easy then uh?
Nicholas Young
Things I can think of in 10 seconds that the kernel isn't sufficient for Login manager Sleep/suspend Special button overlays (vol/brightness/etc) Wifi I could keep going Nothing is that difficult but it's a lot to keep track of and sometimes the setup ends up being more time-consuming than it should have been due to various interdependencies.
>Login manager Comes with the distro unless you mean GUI shit >Special button overlays (vol/brightness/etc) Kernel >Wifi Kernel + installing the firmware package >Sleep/suspend emerge polkit Genkernel doesn't configure shit, if you're lazy use genkernel with xconfig, change the settings to what you actually want and let genkernel do the building
Christopher Johnson
>polkit >privilege escalation kit
Brayden Hill
>Comes with the distro unless you mean GUI shit Things do not simply _come_ with gentoo >Kernel You need an additional applet for the visual indicators and for audio control to work at all with some hardware >Kernel + installing the firmware package Then you need wpa supplicant or network manager and some kind of dhcp daemon >emerge polkit Why even gentoo
Bentley Edwards
>Things do not simply _come_ with gentoo True, it comes with the stage3 >You need an additional applet for the visual indicators and for audio control to work at all with some hardware If you want something that just werks you install KDE which comes with those by default >Why even gentoo Because it's still better suited to my needs than other distros