Thoughts on Gentoo

Many people in and out of the Linux community have heard of Gentoo. There are a lot of different perceptions of the distribution. Some see it as the holy grail of customisability, some see it as a meme of bygone years after being told on countless forums to “install Gentoo” instead of dealing with whatever problem they were having. Well I installed Gentoo, and there’s a lot to unpack.

I’m not new to Linux, but I would not say I have a particularly long wizard beard. I’ve lived out of Arch for a few months, and manage some servers at home and work. I’ve troubleshooted a lot of issues, but there’s so much that goes into Linux that it takes years to properly master. But I installed, following the guide, and didn’t get stuck. I enjoyed the install process, which is much like the Arch one, and appreicated the options open to me. Do I want a hardended system by default, or not? Systemd? All of the choices were there, and then I complied. It was interesting setting flags for the kernel, and although I left most as default that’s because most are good enough for the average user. Since I was just testing the waters, I stuck with the CLI and just did some everyday tasks. Installed some software through every method (ports, binaries, etc) and removed some things. It all felt like it was there, just like any other Linux.

One of the main reasons I was checking Gentoo out to begin with was to determine if it was what I wanted to run on a PowerPC computer or even a i386, for which I definatly would the first. Since Debian and even Ubuntu (that’s a funny story) still support i386, there are options to stick with a stable (TM) OS, but not necessary. Some of my main concerns with Gentoo were with the rumors I had heard: that the wiki was not as good as Arch’s, and that the dev community was pretty toxic. While I really did not get into the dev mailing lists or anything, the wiki seemed still better than Debian’s, and Arch’s was still applicable. Overall, I was pleased with my experience and will install on my PowerPC and perhaps more.

Thanks for reading!