Gentoo Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Gentoo Linux Average rating 8.2 from 51 review(s) What are your thoughts on Gentoo Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- unstablestable20160514201408262012122112.112.011.211.010.12008.02007.02006.12006.02005.12005.02004.32004.22004.12004.01.41.21.1a1.0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: stable Rating: 6 Date: 2023-04-27 Votes: 4 I've been using Gentoo for just over half a year and it's been a mixed bag. The good -------------- USEflags are great, how streamlined kernel customization and upgrading is is also great. The repositories have quite a good range of packages. The community is relatively helpful compared to others. eselect for wine is quite nice. I love being able to choose between stable and testing/unstable on a per-package basis. The choice of init systems is excellent too, OpenRC has given me 0 issues compared to systemd which would often hang for ~2min on every shutdown or restart on Arch and Debian, struggling to terminate something. The bad ------------- Compiling every (mostly every, there binary versions of a scant few packages like firefox and thunderbird) is a chore. Yes, I can still do stuff while I'm updating, but I'm not sure the load on my CPU, my time, and the heat blasted into my house every time something like gcc or llvm needs updated is worth it. I'm happy to compile the things I actually care about and want to customize, but when simple dependencies take 15-30 minutes each in some cases, I dread updating. It prevents me from using some packages I otherwise would enjoy using, too. In some cases it's been a good thing, as it's pushed me to try alternatives (ie newsboat instead of akkregator or rssguard), in others it's just a pain. I quite like the Cinnamon desktop, for example, but if I wanted to use it, I would have to compile a second version of llvm, webkit gtk and spidermonkey which all have quite demanding compile times. Back to the repositories, I have begun to get the impression that Gentoo is lacking in working hands. It's not rare to come across packages in the official repos that mysteriously are without a maintainer, and have been for some time. I've also come across packages I used relatively frequently on other distros being bugged on Gentoo. Both of these things are quite a shame, because at first Gentoo felt very polished, and getting away from a lack of polish was part of why I ditched Arch for it. But overall, at this point, Arch might actually be more polished. I don't think this distro is worth the effort. In the future I'd like to see a distro that uses binaries by default but supports a USEflags-esque system for customizing and compiling the packages where I actually give a damn about them. Until then I will probably return to something that is less work and feels more supported in general, whether Arch or Debian (the next release of Debian in particular sounds excellent, but that is a few months away yet) Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 9 Date: 2023-04-17 Votes: 3 I have been using Gentoo since 2001 (pre-release). It has been great. If you don't have time to keep it updated, it will bite you. USE flags and masking are awesome. This lets you customize your OS to what you want and mostly keep out stuff you don't. If you want something minimal and/or enjoy tweaking, this is for you. A year ago, I would have given it a 10. This is a change in me, not it in. Lately, I haven't been using my computer as often, so it has been become less of a joy. I should probably have installed stable this time. Regarding stable vs unstable: If you are going to have many unstable packages, use unstable. It is more stable than mixing too much. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 1 Date: 2023-04-05 Votes: 6 According to the official website of Gentoo Linux , LiveGUI USB Image is 2 GiB, as soon as you start downloading, you will notice that it's not 2 GiB.. but almost 3 GiB. In the first impression, as if everything is very easy and cool, but the deeper you go, the worse it gets with this Linux distro. I got a feeling that the "fathers" of this Linux distro love to play an awful puzzle with you: making things complicated, saying one and offering something completely different. I think you should be a biiiig fan of this club, and otherwise, please think 100 times before you start with this Gentoo Linux. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 51 reader reviews of Gentoo Linux...