For many decades, I have longed for a genuine gentoo installation,
being tailored exactly to my set-up. However, in all these years,
I have not managed to install one properly. I blame my special hardware
(Ryzen and Nvidia), of course.
Last week, I took time to dive into what has happened in the gentoo area
the last few years, and, to my surprise, I found that there presently are eight distros that would give a gentoo-ish installation.
I tried them all:
calculate
funtoo
gentoo
gentoo studio
pentoo
redcore
sabayon
exgent
Warning: this is a very subjective run-down, based on how these
distros react here, in my playroom. In case you are on an Intel cpu
and a non-nvidia gfx, you may have a much easier task in front of you.
The “properties” I looked for were
recent release date
number of desktop environments easily available
ease of installation
trueness to original gentoo
docs
nvidia (nouveau is not sufficient!)
Ease of installation was the most problematic property.
I have a clean, working Gentoo installation on a spare PC. I gave up at the point where I was trying to install a web browser. There are so many possible USE Flag settings, I threw up my arms and ran away. Now, it just sits there, mocking me.
I ran gentoo around 2003 to 2009, then I switched to Arch. The time compiling everything used to get out of hand after you install more and more software. But it’s a cool distro, and with the use flags you can tailor it to specific uses.
I’ve thought about installing Gentoo at times. But seeing how many updates I get in just for my Arch installs and imagining having to compile it all, I gave up.
Still a cool distro and sometimes I find help for my problems on Gentoo sites on the web.
I love Gentoo. 15 years ago I was new to linux and I had very little experience about it: I had used a little bit of Debian, a little bit of Fedora Core 4. I asked about distro recommendations in the wrong circles and everyone said Gentoo was the best – I believed them and went for it.
I first installed it on a server machine, then on a spare laptop. Then finally I bit the bullet and replaced my home PC’s Windows XP with Gentoo linux in 2007. I have done a total reinstall from scratch exactly once since then. A gentoo setup is bound to work decades if you have the patience to maintain it.
With my 15 years of gentoo experience I’d say if you love a full blown DE like KDE or Gnome with all the bells and whistles and graphical everything, then maybe Gentoo is not the best option. These softwares are so bloated nowadays, you’d spend ages compiling updated things every week.
I run a lean system, a window manager on top of bare Xorg. No systemd no nothing. Gentoo allows a lean system and in part it encourages you to keep it lean because of said recompilation times. I don’t even run libreoffice anymore. My fattest piece of software must be Firefox. It updates very frequently. Chromium was even fatter but I switched to Vivaldi which is basically the same but with a binary distribution.
Frankly I could just as well use Ubuntu or something, the 31337 factor doesn’t really apply here. I just prefer the documentation, I like the approach to /etc config management, portage, ability to run without the systemd borg.
I found the eighth gentoo-ish distro: exgent.
But it stubbornly refuses to boot my machine.
My favourite, so far, is pentoo, which is very easy
to install. Also, it is very true to the genuine thing,
and the special penetration testing stuff that is pentoo’s speciality
can easily be removed after installation
in case you just want ordinary gentoo.
After that post, I resurrected my Gentoo system, and I managed to get Firefox running on it. I am now maintaining the system, daily, and trying to decide what I could use it for.
