How stable is Gentoo now?

bjorntj · Guru Joined: 01 Jun 2005 Posts: 402

I used to run Gentoo but the last couple of years I have mainly been running Fedora... The reason I went away from Gentoo, was that the emerge updates too often broke my system in some way... So I am thinking about trying Gentoo again and was wondering things are kind of stable and minimal of system breakage?

Regards,

BTJ
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d2_racing · Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 12:30 pm Post subject:

Hi, I have been running a Gentoo testing box for a couple of years and I must say that it's pretty stable even on the testing arch.

You should retry

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Hypnos · Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 1:56 pm Post subject:

I've been running Gentoo as my primary OS since 2002. I've done this because I decided a long time ago to eschew binary distros, and Gentoo is a well-functioning option: configuration and installation behave as I would expect, and when things break I can fix them. Whether or not particular applications or drivers work is partly due to the Gentoo maintainer, but mostly due to upstream. You can choose to run software declared stable (as I do), or be a bit more adventurous by using ebuilds in testing.

If you define stability differently, e.g. everything works out of the box, no questions asked, there may be better options: FreeBSD/OpenBSD stable, Debian stable, etc.
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bjorntj · Guru Joined: 01 Jun 2005 Posts: 402

By stable I mean I don't won't to fix broken emerges every other week... But I guess I will try to install Gentoo again and see what happends...

BTJ
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phajdan.jr · Developer Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 1672 Location: Poland

Did you use ~arch or experimental overlays when everything was breaking? I'm running multiple stable (arch) systems and there are no major problems.
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XQYZ · Apprentice Joined: 19 Jul 2009 Posts: 231 Location: Europe

There's rarely anything major. Just pay attention to the updates a bit, remember to recompile kernel modules and run "emerge --depclean" and "revdep-rebuild" after every update and you will be fine.

adomas · Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 9:11 am Post subject:

I just installed/complied Gentoo on x86_64 platform with ~amd64 and it's very stable. I am in love with Gentoo again

using this machine as Desktop Computer with KDE SC 4.6.2 and everything is just fine.

bjorntj · Guru Joined: 01 Jun 2005 Posts: 402

phajdan.jr · Developer Joined: 23 Mar 2006 Posts: 1672 Location: Poland

If you want to avoid breakages, then arch is definitely more stable than ~arch. Anyway, many things have improved: portage, other tools. We also build with --as-needed which reduces the number of required rebuilds... The less "weird" things you do, the more stable the system should be, except bugs of course.
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bammbamm808 · Apprentice Joined: 08 Dec 2002 Posts: 296 Location: Hawaii

skellr · l33t Joined: 18 Jun 2005 Posts: 698 Location: The Village

There are less compile problems now. Now most time is spent yelling at the package manager(s).

ShadowHawkBV · Apprentice Joined: 27 Mar 2004 Posts: 246

The removal of hal caused some grief, but nothing significant. Portage has been really improved since the last time you used Gentoo. But then Gentoo is my drug of choice on all but my netbook(Ubuntu & OpenSuSE unfortunately), so I may be considered a bit biased.
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SLBMEH · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:08 pm Post subject:

In my experience using Gentoo over the past decade... once you have a system installed stuff really only breaks if you break it. For example, I jumped on to test out amd64 when there was no stable tree... or the stable tree wasn't enough to build a system... amd64 has come a long way since then... in general full ~arch builds can break from time to time... especially if you have ridiculous compile settings or use flag combinations set... a lot of times things break because you're trying to do system wide configuration for things that aren't quite ready to be configured system wide... i broke a lot of things forcing as-needed to ld... i would have to say that the stability:up-to-date ratio is one of the best... some packages that you have to compile and patch by hand on other distros, because they don't have an up to date package on it, work perfectly fine and are up to date in portage...

Gentoo itself is a very powerful distribution and environment... it gives you plenty of things to tweak which comes with plenty of things that can be broken... if you're changing something from the default settings be sure you know what kind of impact it creates... especially if you are doing a global configuration change... don't listen to everything you hear such as... use flag "xyxnd" makes everything so much faster... it's generally something experimental... and a lot of the times faster comes with a hit in stability... find a good balance between the two... do your homework when configuring an application for the first time... and do your own benchmarks instead of taking someone's word for some magic configuration setting that makes everything faster... in general the default settings are very sane, fairly optimized, and pretty stable... you should only need to change it in special circumstances...
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Jaglover · Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:54 pm Post subject:

Stable - what you call stable? A box that does not crash or a box that needs user input with upgrades every now and then? Running ~arch gives you very stable system running-wise. You can ignore failing emerges, they will be fixed. Or you can contribute and report bugs.
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