Gentoo Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Gentoo Linux Average rating 9.2 from 92 review(s) Please selecting a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least one sentence about the distribution while limiting your review to 2040 characters. 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 Comments (maximum 2,040 characters): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: stable Rating: 10 Date: 2018-12-01 Votes: 3 Lets me choose what I will have in my system, more than any other distro. Excellent package manager, helpful community, documentation,.. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2018-11-19 Votes: 5 I've been using Gentoo for over 15 years so I'm sure my experiences will be different than someone just coming into Gentoo. It's also pretty much the only distro I've used other than Slackware (I've used others, but not "full time"). I don't distrohop. Once I found Gentoo I was happy and I haven't really seen anything better yet (also NixOS might get there someday). Pretty much all my boxes (desktop, server, VMs and containers) run Gentoo. They're all specialized for some particular task, so my database box is completely different than my desktop box (as far as USE flags, configuration, etc). My advice, which is kind of expert-level. Use different projects with different configs and build them on a CI box. For example I have two "base" Jenkins projects: stable and unstable, which are just vanilla (handbook) installs of Gentoo. They poll the portage git repo and build binary packages continuously. From there I have system-specific builds for desktops, application servers, media servers, docker servers, etc. Even Jenkins has it's own project for building a Jenkins server. These all have their own USE flags, CFLAGS, etc. Then when I actually want to install on actual hardware (or a VM or container), I point it to whichever Jenkins project as a binary package host and it pulls all of it's packages from there. I hardly ever have to build on the actual boxes and I'm always up to date (because of CI). If you set up your systems in CI first then it makes setting up/building a new Gentoo system a snap. Keep your /etc/portage(s) in revision control and you can make sure your changes stay sync. Then you only have to worry about kernel configuration. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 9 Date: 2018-10-26 Votes: 7 TL;DR: If you're very comfortable with the Linux ecosystem there really isn't anything more performant or precise than creating your own bespoke distro via Gentoo. Discussion: We use Gentoo for 2.5 things: 1- The basis for a binary distribution that we run in our data center servers 2- The basis for a binary distribution that we run on our deployed data appliances 2.5- A lot of us have come to like it and run it as our desktop system The "binary distribution" part may be unfamiliar to new users. Gentoo is not a "distribution" in the way that Ubuntu is. It is a meta-distribution which provides all the parts necessary to build your own distribution. Most users build only a single copy of their distribution: the one running on their immediate system. Gentoo also lets you build a repository of pre-compiled binaries that can then be installed and run the way normal distribution packages are -- which in a server environment with 200+ systems or a distributed environment serving thousands of clients is definitely the way to go. As long as you understand what hardware you have on hand and don't get too crazy with unnecessary optimizations or conflicting source versions (from external code sources, especially) then Gentoo "just works" and continues to pretty much until your hardware breaks outright. There are no catastrophic "release upgrade" cycles. The kicker: Portage is amazing, weird bits and all. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 92 reader reviews of Gentoo Linux...