Comment by account42
3 days ago
> 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...