Comment by contingencies
3 days ago
I used it on an off as my daily machine for around 15-20 years I think. It is fast in terms of execution-on-hardware speed, and genuinely puts you in control. For a certain kind of user this is more important than anything.
These days I'm on OSX mostly because of the frequency of business trips meant I needed something small and portable a few years ago, and now the hardware is so much better than what you can get for the PC world. Plus, I am hyper-conscious of my time and can't really afford to be fiddling with new system libraries, kernel configurations and so forth.
Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall, and after enough iterations I'd started to err to Ubuntu at some point. But it was by far the most fun of any Linux I used, save perhaps Slackware which was my first.
I think in a few years' time the next machine I build will be a non-Apple ARM custom portable, hopefully running Gentoo, with a lot of custom machining and hardware features.
> It is fast in terms of execution-on-hardware speed, and genuinely puts you in control.
After installing Gentoo I felt I should make some kind of change, and I wanted to replace the GNOME foot in the GNOME menu with an icon I found of the Gentoo "g" in a wizard hat.
I found documentation suggesting that the menu's icon was controlled by some setting somewhere, and I changed that setting to point to the wizard-hat icon.
The menu was unaffected. If I viewed the menu bar's properties, the menu was associated with the wizard-hat icon in the properties display, but it continued to show the foot icon in its name.
I had nothing else to go on and gave up. I'm still mad about that.
> Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall
Well, that did happen to me once. But it happened after I uninstalled glibc. I can't really blame Gentoo for that. I always saw it as positive that Gentoo allowed me to do something that ridiculous.
once? You obviously weren't using it long! All sorts of portage tree screwups would affect you periodically that weren't your fault. Details escape me, it just happened, my recollection is circa annually to 24 months. Usually accompanied by some tacit admission of guilt in an enews item. Longer installs were a rarity without a combination of paranoia and luck or a working snapshot setup.
One thing Gentoo would also let you do, unlike any other distro I'm aware of, was install managed cross-compilation toolchains with deep control preserved. An awesome feature if you are building images for variant embedded devices at any frequency.
> at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall
My advice is to start using btrfs snapshots. Make a backup snapshot, run the updates, and if anything breaks, just "btrfs set-default" to the backup snapshot and everything is working again.
Looked in to ZFS snapshots and pretty sure I had it working for awhile, the challenge was the boot sequence required for a custom kernel and rootfs was pretty non-transparent when you wanted to combine the snapshots with encryption and GPT disk label support. Or that's my recollection, anyway. I think a lot of gentoo users these days probably just use genkernel and run scripts for initial root fs generation, ceding control, but that's sort of against the mentality that brought me to gentoo IMHO. Also, stick with openrc...
> Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall
Not at all. I have even recovered from bricking the package manager (my fault, these days there are protections in place against that). Worst case you manually extract working binaries and then clean up the mess. And I have never run into issues that needed such drastic measures without doing stupid things.
It is however not a distro for those unwilling to understand how it works.
Yes, this is classic gentoo: recover using some massive hassle technique then tell everyone about it, incrementally growing your knowledge of system failure modes. But once you'd done that a few times you realised keeping your system cleanly structured and doing a clean reinstall was probably a far better strategy for personal time and sanity preservation if you actually wanted to get anything done...