Gentoo Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Gentoo Linux Average rating 8.6 from 73 review(s) Please select 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: 2025-03-31 Votes: 28 Using it for 10+ years and enjoy every moment. Since early years I switched to unstable branch which to me was very stable all years. Most of packages were compiled with O3/Ofast + LTO before it became mainstream and yet only some required manual override to use O3 only + selective additional flags. Once you setup it up once, further support is very easy. Once in a while they migrate to new default python version or other minor updates and they post ahead of time what you need to do and what will happen if you ignore the update. Before Gentoo I tried Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, Puppy, Mandriva, Manjaro, Fedora, Elementary. However, most of them suffered from the same problem, when something breaks it was hard to fix since old version depends on some library that is not shipped or if you want to install something not from the default repository, you will face all hell of binary dependencies. I ended up building additional world to support some programs that I was using. Needless to say that if you want to enjoy the latest and greatest versions, most of mentioned distros are not going to provide such an experience. While everybody know that Debian is for 'stability', but even Ubuntu/Mint struggle to provide recent versions of Proton/Plasma or whatever you like. Gaming works great. You can use it as a DAW. You can stream with it and not experience strange statters, which I observed on other computers (Manjaro, Mint) that my family uses. Another significant feature is ability to chose systemd/openrc. My main computer and server have openrc, while laptop has systemd. Systemd did not convince me to try it one more time, but Gentoo allows you to replace everything you can imagine with systemd implementations. Other distros often make the decision for you and often force you to use systemd and good luck trying to replace it manually. I feel myself free since I can link basically any git repo and use it as a package. This requires some experience but other distros do not allow this at all. As you can see I am a big fan of Gentoo. If you want to hop from one distro to another with hope that the next one will solve your problems, this is your choice. I made a right decision years ago and enjoy it since. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 6 Date: 2025-02-28 Votes: 1 Gentoo has a lot of potential as a Linux distro. I've tried Gentoo on and off for the past few years and I can understand why many are a fan of Gentoo. Gentoo is in between Arch and Debian on updates, Gentoo is more of a stable rolling release. Gentoo gives users options between bleeding edge and stability. Gentoo even allows users to choose between binary and compiled packages. Gentoo seems to give users options. I have had problems trying to find packages for Gentoo. Gentoo does have guru which is equivalent to Arch's AUR, however, many packages there are either broken or outdated. Gentoo is a bit harder than Arch. Gentoo's learning curve is very steep. Gentoo may require packages to be unmasked to install, which makes installing packages more difficult. Gentoo's handbook is well written, but could use some improvement. I realize Gentoo isn't for everyone as it seems to be more of a niche distro. Gentoo isn't bleeding edge meaning this will help with stability. One piece of advice I would recommend to new users is to start out simple, meaning don't optimize your system with USE flags at first, let yourself get used to Gentoo's package manager, possibly start with binary packages then work your way down. This was my mistake when I first tried Gentoo. I just can't see myself daily driving Gentoo as it seems to be a lot of maintenance and the repo seems a bit small. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-02-03 Votes: 53 Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's also very stable because by default Portage (the Gentoo package manager) install stable versions. But for example, you can override it just for a couple of packages and get new bleeding edge versions of just those packages that you need. Gentoo is even more flexible than that. You can choose to use Musl, LLVM (Clang) and OpenRC instead of Glibc, GCC and Systemd. Or you can choose any combination of those. But it doesn't stop there! You can use the Portage package manager and one of its features called "USE flags" to easily select features that can be enabled or disabled at compile time. For example, I don't ever use Bluetooth or geolocation, so I can just disable support for both at compile-time! You can even set different USE flags on per-package basis, if you want or need to. Of course, there is a global way of setting USE flags in your Portage make.conf file, and Portage profiles provide sane defaults (I suggest using a profile that has "desktop" in its name, if you are new to Gentoo Linux). But Portage offers even more options for customization! You can select the CFLAGS on per-package basis, if you want to (or you can specify them globally on your make.conf). This is useful for enabling debugging information for just a couple of packages. You can also easily apply custom patches to source code files! Despite of having all of these customization options available to you, you don't have to micromanage every tiniest of details of your system, if you don't want to. Gentoo Linux doesn't need more maintenance work than something like Arch Linux or Alpine Linux, after you install it on your computer. The only "drawback" or tradeoff of using Gentoo Linux is the fact that you build most of the packages from source code. And that requires a CPU with multiple cores and plenty of RAM. But that doesn't mean that you necessarily need a very high-end computer to run Gentoo because you can definitely use it on a regular quad-core system with 8GB of RAM and everything works fine (I have tested this!). If you are unsure whether your system can run Gentoo (or if installing Gentoo seems too difficult or something), I suggest first using VirtualBox or qemu and test it in a virtual machine before installing it on your real disk. It's also worth noting that you can use Flatpak to get some of the programs, so you don't necessarily need to build everything from source. And there is official binary package repository ("binhost") that's maintained by Gentoo development team. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 73 reader reviews of Gentoo Linux...