Why Gentoo?

nubinetwork

I've been using Gentoo since 2003, and I don't really plan on changing any time soon... > We don’t go out of our way to tell you how to use your system I'm not really sure I believe this, because the default profiles do exactly that. One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock.

aeonik

I didn't realize how strict they were against LLMs. Codex has really helped my fix and tighten up my AUR PKGBUILDs. I was thinking about trying Gentoo in the future, but not being able to contribute because I use LLMs in my workflow sucks.

hparadiz

I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

kombine

Never used Gentoo, but what is its advantages over, say, Guix? I don't actually use guix or nix as a daily driver, although one year ago I did install Guix on a separate partition of my desktop PC and I use nix via Home manager to install various cli-based tools.

ajsnigrutin

Gentoo is great! You can just drop a patch into a folder, and every time you re/install or upgrade a package, it'll get applied! You know that weird thing that bothers you in that specific software? That random popup when you start it? That additional, unneeded "ok" prompt? That donation-begging screen? That stupid checkmark checked on/off by default when it should be off/on instead? Well, make a patch to fix it, drop it into /etc/portage/patches/<category>/<packagename>/ and it'll get applied automatically every time! And if it's truly a minor thing that bugs you, that patch will work for many new versions too! (no, i'm not being paid by gentoo to promote them)

Gualdrapo

Gentoo is customizable. But really customizable. That's my #1 reason for using it.

senectus1

I have fond memories of spending long nights recompiling with new flags to try and get slightly better FPS in games... this was over 25 years ago so not in the proton heyday we have now. These days I'm a fair bit lazier, throw Fedora on and use it happily. update frequently and it almost never causes me any issues. The Gentoo Forums were a super fun and friendly place back then, I hope they haven't lost that spirit.

sharts

What kinda baby would come from mashing together gentoo, void, freebsd, and nix?

anon291

I used to be a hardcore gentoo-er, but Nix is more sensible and has a more cohesive model.

clippy99

Gentoo veterans should remember this one: https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...

aidenn0

I agree 100% with this article. However I switched to NixOS several years ago. On the axes I most care about, NixOS is better than Gentoo. In particular, managing configurations in NixOS is really a breeze. No more merging diffs of random files in /etc. On one hand, you could say that Nix has more magic than Gentoo, but on the other hand, the online nix option search links directly to the source code implementing the option. Gentoo wins on documentation and supporting more than one init system. It probably also wins on security; I haven't dug recently, but NixOS doesn't have a great story for e.g. Mandatory Access Control. Also the nix store is world-readable, so it is much easier than it should be to accidentally spill your secrets to the entire system.

omgwtfbyobbq

How else was I supposed to slowly roast my motherboard in 2002? I did think it was neat finding a memory leak in visual boy advance.

bombcar

> For example, we are probably one of the few distributions that do not amend our bzip2 package with a nonstandard pkg-config file; so if you develop on Gentoo, you won’t make the absurdly common mistake of publishing a package that requires that file. What's this in reference to?

techcode

Let me just leave it here... With Gentoo you get to choose SystemD or no SystemD ;)

alekq

As a long-time Gentoo user and supporter, my main issue is the time investment. Not the investment in installing and initial setup, not compilation in the background (binary packages make things much easier today), but staying up-to-date with software upgrades and changes. I did not mind it before the "life happened", but now when it takes even one available night in a month or two, it seems a lot. Other issue is when you need something promptly, if nothing else to test it out or one-use only and you either have to wait or use something like official binary/flatpak...