Comment by thaumasiotes
3 days ago
> 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.