Gentoo Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Gentoo Linux Average rating 8.3 from 53 review(s) Please selecting a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 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 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: unstable Rating: 10 Date: 2023-08-24 Votes: 19 The best Linux distribution I have ever used. Thanks to this distribution I really understood what I needed and what I didn't need on my system. I am truly in control of what happens on my PCs, for better or for worse. You can also understand the frustration of users used to installing binaries, but for those who want to learn and really understand a linux system and are not afraid to make mistakes this is the distribution that gives you the most. I hope it will never change and that it will always stay this way. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 9 Date: 2023-07-15 Votes: 1 The customization works nice for me. I don't want systemd as init and openrc, for me, might be the main advantage that gentoo has over other distros. Bein able to unconfigure (e.g. systemd-)dependencies wherever possible for all packages is a big plus. Compiling the system over again every x days of course is a bit tedious but I guess you can't have one without the other. My personal environment is very lightweight, so I don't use any Desktop Environments etc.; Luckily, for libreoffice there's a binary package, too. That leaves me with the main heavyweights llvm, firefox, rust and maybe clang that will take their time to compile. Basically, updating every 3 days overnight does the job for me. I would not trade the flexibility and most important freedom of choice that gentoo offers for a quicker install of packages, so I'm good. I also have to say that for now 10+ years, the rolling releases have cause little trouble for me. On some rare occasions I had to fix some reverse dependencies when updating in bigger intervals like 1 or 2 months. Apart from that, I feel like using the same config and system for over 10 years now quite reliably. Even to the point that I feel that my knowledge of system maintenance is fading because I never hve to bother with it. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 6 Date: 2023-04-27 Votes: 7 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 See all 53 reader reviews of Gentoo Linux...