How Did You Get Here?

[s0ulslack1]

Microsoft broh

[superjaded]

[decuser]

Back in 1991, my dad gave me a PDP 8 and I couldn't get it working, so he gave me a DEC Rainbow 100b with DOS 3.10b and some version of CP/M. I figured out how to use xmodem and my 300 baud modem to log in to my wife's VMS account with a portal to the internet. In the next couple of years, I saw an announcement for 0.9 kernel and Slackware w/x11 came along, so I downloaded the 11 floppy images, wrote 'em out, booted 'em and eventually got X to work. But Window 95 came out and I stopped messing with Linux for a while. In '98, my work gave me an account on jackflash, a solaris box and I found out what RCS was good for when everybody at work lost their backups and I didn't.

Over the next handful of years, I would install some version of Linux... Redhat for a while, until redhat 5, then debian, even once way back when, gentoo, then lfs, then ubuntu, all the while staying on Windows for work. In 2005, I bought a Mac, then two, then three and with MacOS, I became sold on unix. I haven't looked back since, whenever I have to use a Windows machine, I really dislike it. In 2008, I installed FreeBSD on one of my machines to serve up git via scmmanager and was introduced to the miracle that is ZFS. Around that same time or a bit thereafter, I found Linux Mint and between MacOS for macs, FreeBSD for the server, and Mint for my daily driver, I have been very happy.

In 2023, my Macs were showing their age. Apple dropped support for these perfectly satisfactory computing devices. I was disgusted. My quad core i7 with 16 gigs of ram being more than capable of running pretty much anything out there, but for the fact that a company decided so mote it be! I decided to leave the corporate OS market completely for my home environment and had to decide between Linux and BSD. I love FreeBSD - but, it won't run a lot of things I want to run without a lot of tweakage and some things just plain won't run. Linux Mint - as far as I can tell remains one of the best distributions on the planet, but their flagship is Ubuntu based (and I really did swear off corporate os stuff). I tried LMDE and it's pretty good, but it's not up to complete parity with Mint Cinnamon. I love Mint, but there's another nit to pic, Cinnamon, not my favorite DE. I tried XFCE on Mint and like LMDE it's not complete parity with the Cinnamon version. So, then it was off to another distro, so I tried MX Linux (another great distro) and the ease with witch I switched between Mint and MX brought me to the realization that I may just be ready for something a bit more challenging and a lot more instructive.

I have my home systems all running Linux (MX at the moment, but Mint's been in the mix, too) now and I'm blown away at how far we've come in the last 30 years. I feel confident about my basic skills with the system to want to try a new way of exploring. When I went out to OSNews the other day, I saw the Gentoo's gone binary announcement and thought "oh, goody" I can download it and give it a try, thinking it'd be similar to the million and one hops I've made in the past. Well, as it turns out, that's not the case. But what is, is that I was reintroduced to the handbook and think this may actually be a golden opportunity to go deeper in to the rabbit hole, so to speak.

So, in a nutshell, what brought me here was a long and twisty road of dos, windows, linux, bsd, macos, and more linux. What'll keep me around for a while is the technical depth of the handbook, and the opportunity to learn how it all "really" works .

[Abraxas]

I went through hell recompiling mplayer and various dependencies trying to get codecs to work on RedHat in 2002. My roommate found Gentoo and I decided to give it a try since I ended up needing to recompile everything on RedHat to get the features I wanted anyway. I figured I would just use something that let me do that easier.
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Time makes more converts than reason. - Thomas Paine
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. - Mark Twain

[Zucca]

[NeddySeagoon]

A sprinkle of fairy dust, then few past the second star on the right and straight on 'till morning. :)
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Tortue]

Microsoft Windows. That was in 1998

I was constantly frustrated by the fact that I could never find the reason why something did not work. I had been reading on Linux for a while in computer magazines, so I decided to give it a try. I bought a CD of Redhat (5.2, I think), and installed it on my faithful 486. I remember that I spent quite a time to find drive A:, only to realize that it had to be mounted under another name. But I also discovered that the logs would help me when something went wrong.

After a few years of trying all kinds of distros (SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware...) but still staying with Redhat, I became fed up with "dependency hell" each time I wanted to install a non-mainstream program that seemed intersting, so I decided to look for something that would give me more control on my system. At that time, Gentoo was in the top three distros on Distrowatch. That was in 2004. It seemed a bit complicated to install, but I thought my basic knowledge of Linux (still basic??) could help me in this adventure. I followed the Handbook to the letter : disk partitioning, downloading stage 1 tarball (bootstrap anyone?), chrooting, manual configuration of the kernel, etc, and ended up with a working basic system. The rest is history. I have been using Gentoo since then for about anything: everyday desktop, web and mail server, mythtv, file server (on a Raspberry Pi with two big USB disks), time server for the whole network, local mirror...

What I really like about Gentoo is the fact that it is a rolling release. Install once, update regularly. I recently discovered on the server that I used as a local miror and distfile cache and that had stopped working because of a faulty disk, a stage3 tarball dating back to 2013. That tells you how long you can run a system without reinstalling!

And, of course, this Forum has always been very useful for me.

Long live Gentoo!
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"La vie est un formidable scénariste"
- Le cinéaste Bertrand Tavernier, citant un ami

[Zeault]

How did I get here?

it was this meme: linux beards

[Taigo]

I don't really remember anymore how I exactly got into Linux even tho I'm just 18 years old.
I got here because I started using Linux and went deeper into how it works and Gentoo let's you build the system yourself so it really attracted to me.
I first started using Ubuntu then Mint and then i wanted to see more so I did a bunch of distrohopping and I have no clue where i all ended up,
but eventually I got to Arch and I didn't have a lot of Linux knowledge on Arch when I wanted to try it first but i just did and after a few weeks managed
to actually install it successfully, and I learned a lot while doing that so I wanted more. Ever since I really got into Linux and eventually ended up using
gentoo which i found interesting because you could build your packages, and even your kernel however you like.

[Taigo]

[depontius]

I began running Linux by borrowing a copy of RedHat 4.0 from a co-worker and installing it. At the time there was some licensed software in it, so after trying it I wiped it right away. Then when RedHat 4.1 came out from CheapBytes I bought that, installed it, and have run Linux ever since. In those days I was on the RedHat .0 .1 .2 treadmill and stayed there for years. Then one day RedHat 8 came out, with no ".0" behind it. I knew something was up and began casting about for a new distribution. I looked at all sorts of things like Debian and its offshoots, considering stability maintainability and all of those business-like things.

THEN I thought again and realized that this was a hobby - it was supposed to be fun. So I went distribution shopping looking for the geekiest thing I could find - which was Gentoo. Funny thing, overall I've found it to be excellent for stability and maintainability. There was a period of a few years where I had my mother - in her late 70s and early 80s running Gentoo. I would run "glsa-check" weekly and do security updates, then twice a year when visiting (640 miles away) I would do a full update. Only once did I muff "lilo" and have to have a cousin over to boot the old kernel so I could get things back in shape.
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.sigs waste space and bandwidth

[FilthyPitDog]

Been using Gentoo now for about 5 years, I was a avid distrohopper and just needed to find a distro with the customization like Gentoo provides. I think ill be using Gentoo for life, the most glorious OS ever created.
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Gentoo is a way of life...

[e8root]

I tinkered with various Linux distribution from the very late 90s (one of the first distros I remember was SuSE 6) in an "from time to time" bursts but never really made them my main system always going back to Windows. Then longer pause until I got Raspbery Pi 4 and after I made simple server out of it I didn't use it much. Recently Raspberry Pi 5 reignited my interest in Linux and so I decided to try Gentoo on smaller ITX computer with Broadwell Xeron which I recently acquired.

I dedicated whole Sunday to installation - mostly waiting for stuff to compile and reading handbook. Managed to get in to desktop and all but then I thought to myself that I should probably do it on my main PC which is much faster (Core i5 13600K) and do it maybe more permanently to learn Linux better.

I like its compiled from source and that its targeting my specific machine and not some binaries which were made for old Athlon 64... not even it cause its really common part of AMD K8 and Prescott which most binary distros target. Gentoo is maybe more demanding at first but imho this is an illusion. In Linux sooner or later sheet hit the fan and then all the skills you would learn configuring little simple parts of the system would be useful but then you are used up to things automatically configure itself. Not a valid way forward. Using Gentoo is still not making Linux from scratch and has its own unique quirks but so far I think they make more sense given the goal which is building from sources in highly configurable package manager.

In other words what brought me to the bright side is focus of Gentoo to build software from sources. Also I always wanted to install Gentoo but in the past doing it from within just raw terminal did seem a bit overwhelming. LiveDVD/USB where I could watch YT while installing/configuring system was much nicer experience. Also I see idea of trying out distros pretty pointless. Installed lots of them over the years and even though I didn't stick with them for very long this part of experience I have all behind me and span over last ~25 years with even FreeBSD in the mix.

My plans are to stick with the system and really keep it running as it is without need to reinstall. I will at some point want to install Gentoo on Raspberry Pi 5 and maybe even on Rapsberry Pi 4 - probably with 5 rebuilding world for 4 as it makes more sense that way.
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Unix Wars - Episode V: AT&T Strikes Back

[shieldoxacillin]

I was very into Linux (and still am) in 2021 and distrohopped a lot until I eventually heard about Gentoo and decided to give it a try because I wanted to learn the deeper things about how software works. Installed it several times because I couldn't decide between an unencrypted and an encrypted install, ended up going for an encrypted one.

6 months later I decided that Linux was inconveniencing me and switched to Windows where I am now. However, I decided that I want to go back to Linux and specifically Gentoo because all the reasons I went back to Windows are gone.

[CaptainBlood]

shieldoxacillin,
M$ + Linux could help.

I'm doing it here UEFI + grub.

Unsecure Boot is required as long as you don't buy a sort of M$ compatible UEFI private/public key, IIUC.

Thks 4 ur attention, interest & support.
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USE="-* ..." in /etc/portage/make.conf here.
LT: "I've been doing a passable imitation of the Fontana di Trevi, except my medium is mucus. Sooo much mucus. "

[Hu]

shieldoxacillin asserted there is no reason to stay on Windows, so Windows compatibility may not matter now. If it does, for some purposes, running Windows in a qemu-kvm guest can suffice. This is likely not good enough for recent games, but for someone who only needs to run "office" style applications, the performance is quite adequate.

Secure Boot requires that every step in the chain be properly verified. Most Linux distributions, including Gentoo, have a Wiki page discussing Secure Boot (Gentoo Wiki: Secure Boot; Arch Linux Wiki: Secure Boot). I have not read either of those closely enough to vouch for their content, but I have been generally pleased with the quality of both the Gentoo and Arch Linux Wikis on a variety of subjects.

For x86-based platforms, verification does not require Microsoft approval, since x86 firmware is (or at least, was) required to allow the user to install a custom-chosen verification key. However, as shieldoxacillin made no mention of using secure boot (and instead talked about an encrypted install, which is unrelated), I think a further discussion of Secure Boot in this thread is premature.

shieldoxacillin: if you want to install Gentoo, and have questions about how to achieve advanced features (secure boot, encrypted boot, LVM, etc.), please post in Installing Gentoo with a description of what you want, your progress with the attempted install (0% is fine, if you want to plan before you start), and an approximation of your skill level. We can help users who need guidance, and telling us how new (or not) you are will help us determine how much to assume about your abilities.

[mega_flow]

was tired of Windows Millennium. and her bugs
I play with Red Hat Linux and it source code. when i heard about Gentoo. never left again
I've tried other distros over the years. but none came close to portage use convenience
It's strange to think how far Linux has come over the years
I still play Quake 3 occasionally
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Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10875H - GeForce GTX 1660 Ti Mobile

[pizza-rat]

Switched to Linux when Windows 10 was being pushed. I was still on 7 because everything else that had come after it seemed absolutely awful. Started with Arch (I did try Ubuntu back when I was a teen, but it didn't go well), then hopped back between it and Debian stable several times. Eventually tried Gentoo, because I'm a sucker for tweaking and fine tuning. I liked it, but I was really burnt out on learning new distros at that point and went back to Debian stable.

Alas, Debian Bookworm has not been a particularly good experience for me, and I've come to realize I'm willing to take the time to settle into Gentoo "for good" as it'll likely be less work longterm and a better experience overall. I also find that the atmosphere and attitude of Gentoo's developers/community/userbase is more my speed than Debian's or Arch's. Less corporate than Debian. Enthusiasts but not elitists.