Is Gentoo practical?

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

2 months? Pah! That's nothing!

Seriously 'tho, you're very unlikely to have settled into a distro in such a short space of time.
It took me a over year for both Slackware and Gentoo because I'm always finding new little quirks and stuff. Ubuntu I still consider myself a total n00b at, and I've been toying with that on me lappy for a good few months...

I find switching to a different distro after becoming settled into one is like, major culture shock, and often instills an instant dislike of how things are done until you get used to it again...

dbodner · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2007 Posts: 54

JeanValjean · n00b Joined: 27 Aug 2007 Posts: 61

I installed gentoo on this computer almost a year ago now, and just updated it for the first time. During the entire time, I only had 3 emerges break - pretty good. Gentoo - once a person learns it - is much simpler to upgrade considering the a good number of users of distros like Ubunut do complete reinstalls every 6 months, I'm glad i don't have to worrry about that.

d2_racing · Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2007 4:37 pm Post subject:

Yeah Gentoo is a rolling release...me too I'm glad

ghevan · n00b Joined: 14 Feb 2007 Posts: 2

Gentoo is practical for me. Ive come from ubuntu and at first reinstalling the whole system wasn't a big deal but after doing it several times I wanted something diferente to keep me updated. Also most of the times I needed help I eneded up reading gentoo wikis and documentation.

SO for me gentoo is practical as I just have to update everyonce in a while to get the software as updated as I need, and in case of having any trouble (just a few) I can find almost everything on the gentoo guides.

I still use Ubuntu on the laptop, but I really miss a lot of the config files of gentoo at ubuntu, and the progressive updates.

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

Jinxter2K7 · n00b Joined: 10 Dec 2007 Posts: 15

d2_racing · Posted: Thu Dec 27, 2007 6:26 pm Post subject:

Yeah, it will be perfect when we will compile or 8 cores or 16 cores...the compilation time will be just a thing from the past.

calr0x · Apprentice Joined: 16 Aug 2004 Posts: 244

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Dec 30, 2007 11:29 pm Post subject:

calr0x,

You need an update disipline with Gentoo.

You can update every day if you want, or every time the installer is updated, or something in between to suit you.
The problem is that playing with Gentoo is often more satisfying than doing the work you are supposed to be doing.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

Suicidal · l33t Joined: 30 Jul 2003 Posts: 959 Location: /dev/null

Kaste · Posted: Thu Jan 03, 2008 9:12 pm Post subject:

I started off with Suse for 6 months and switched to Gentoo 2 years ago after getting bored with trying to make SUSE do what i want.

Now there were times when i was installing some computers and i though maybe try a new distro, Gentoo would take to long for the case at hand, so i was trying Ubuntu every time.

Maybe i have an aweful lot of bad luck but every time i tried to install Ubuntu it fails horribly. It is so weird. I tried it on five(!) different computers, laptop and normal desktop towers ranging from 0,5 to 2 Years old and it never even installed.

So maybe i would already be using Ubuntu if it would actually install

.

Seriously though, I have seen weird things with Gentoo, some of them (well actually a lot of them) my fault, a few ones Gentoo's I think, but still it's fun, i learn and i have a Windows install around that i rarely boot into just to remind me what non working distro and maintenance cost really means. (You wouldn't believe how screwed up I got it just by being to lazy to reinstall it for the last 2 years)

Gentoo works just fine I think and I am more willing to put up with the random oddness than lose the power it offered. My Gentoo install is now almost 2 years old and it is a piece of art. It turns prettier all the time.
_________________
I'm a membar of Mesnar and me scull contains wakky secrets!

Hypnos · Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 2:51 pm Post subject:

Whether it's my day job or relaxing, the majority of my day is spent with my mind interfaced with my laptop. So like any place where you spend a lot of time, you want to feel comfortable both in terms of getting things done and aesthetics. You want things just so.

I run a nearly stable system, the notable exceptions being drivers for certain PC crapware and Paludis. I don't care for the bleeding edge; just security updates on a regular basis, and software upgrades when there are new features I want.

I use Gentoo because the entire platform allows me to tailor the system efficiently, coherently. To make it just so.
_________________
Personal overlay | Simple backup scheme

Malakai · Apprentice Joined: 24 Dec 2002 Posts: 299

Once you get used to the filesystem layout and tools, gentoo is the best.

Until then, it can be very frustrating. This really isn't a fault of gentoo though, linux is a very deep and customizable os compared to windows, and we have been using windows for a very long time. Learning to tinker with the core of your os is something youve never done before and it takes time.

I love my gentoo now after coming back from 2 years on xp, with a new system and powerful hardware.
linux evolved quite well, as did gentoo IMO. It all runs great and ultra fast. And there are new gentoo/portage tools and stuff like /etc/portage/* that makes everything way easier to use than before. I used gentoo almost exclusively for over a year, but left when I started playing games with zero support at all. Right now all my games work fine here, even eve online which always held me away.

I think people get bogged down on choices too. Especially WM/DE's. But of course this is a plus not a minus, it just takes time to find out what you like better. XFCE has come a long way I quite like it ^^

pteppic · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2005 Posts: 781

Unne · l33t Joined: 21 Jul 2003 Posts: 616

I update world every couple days, and I can't remember the last time I spent more than 5 mnutes of effort on it. After your system is set up things take care of themselves to a large degree.

On the other hand I can remember the last time I spent one and half hours compiling some packages on a server running Debian because the packages available through apt were compiled in such a way as to render them unable to run on my system.
_________________
Obligatory hompage link.

micmac · l33t Joined: 28 Nov 2003 Posts: 996

Phoenix591 · Guru Joined: 17 Sep 2007 Posts: 483

for one reason that hasn't been mentioned ( I agree with those already said) I like Gentoo over other distros is that when using other distros, it feels like they don't want you to touch their config files, and that everything will break if you do .

Hypnos · Posted: Fri Feb 08, 2008 4:43 am Post subject:

Along these same lines, I decided to try Gentoo back in 2002 because I was tired of having build my own binaries to get the features I wanted, and then having to maintain the dependency chain for them. The intractable problem, of course, was that the dependency chain for my custom binaries was not always consistent with the rest of the stock system.

That being said, it would be great if someone could develop a more intelligent revdep-rebuild ("reconcilio" in Paludis) system. It doesn't handle binaries which have Java deps, script languages, or the weirdness with "liblber.so" in openldap.
_________________
Personal overlay | Simple backup scheme

yix · n00b Joined: 08 Feb 2008 Posts: 2

For me it's practical as a desktop system.

Due to its compiling nature, the stability of some of the components might be at times uncertain, but tweakable to near-certainty. For a desktop system I can live with that.

artworcs · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Jun 2005 Posts: 126

Last year my / reiserfs partition decided that life it not worth living and refused to mount. After an ugly rebuild-tree my partition reverted to the state it was 4 months before the crash except that half my system was gone. Since I didn't have any recent backups, but still had my world file and most of /etc I started rebuilding the system. All it took was a 1-2 hours to get portage running(with the help of some binary packages) and a long world compile, followed by running a script to remove all the files portage didn't know about. I got my system back but i won't recommend reiserfs again

Maybe its just me, but I find the (small)amount of work(fun) that running an ~x86 gentoo system requires a small price to pay for the flexibility it gives you. I've been a Linux user for more then 8 years but I've only switched full time 4 years ago when I've found gentoo.

Every now and then I take a peek at the competition, but i never stay. I always get back to gentoo, because I've created this system, I know its every detail and no matter how broken it is i can always use init=/bin/sh

PS: keeping regular backups is a good thing and I certainly learned my lesson

grot · n00b Joined: 17 Dec 2014 Posts: 33

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2015 11:00 am Post subject:

Gentoo is more practical as anything else so far.

No annoying blue screens or does not work or random crashes as i had in this redmoon 95 / xp world.

no fancy configs which are hard to understand or solve like in ubuntu. i gave up finding the sources / way to customize the kernel. to get rid of bloatware.

the thing of ubuntu is that is bloatware
the thing of arch linux is taht the package manger there asumes that you know lots to get something done

i just want a bloatfree, iconfree desktop, without fancy windows vista like panels / Desktop icons and other shit which no one ever needs, wants

i just want to have a few things and these should work. => i3wm.org with nemo / k3b / google-chrome / gimp / lilyterm ... that covers 99 percent of my use case these days.

These binary distros with gnome / kde / lxde have in every version changed icons / changed spots for everything which is kinda annoying to see a broken feature or to look for something much longer...

And my gentoo hardly breaks while upgrading as it used to be years ago as i started. But maybe thats the use case because i only use i3wm without any fancy dependencies. That could be also gnomes fault, which i do not use anymore.

kettuz · n00b Joined: 25 Dec 2004 Posts: 27

Is it practical?

Well...

For many years I didn't use anything else than Gentoo. I installed it on my mother's computer, on my wife's computer, on computers of different architechtures...

Then I graduated from university, got a job and became a father. As much as I loved Gentoo and all the fiddling, I was increasingly anxious to do updates as I never knew if I had to be prepared to do some heavier maintenance, update configs and repair conflicts between different packages. The amount of time I have spent waiting for something to compile... And if there was a longer pause between updates, the chance of something breaking in a very fundamental way got much higher.

So in 2013, after about 8 years of Gentoo I tried Ubuntu (with Unity) on my own computer and was surprised at its stability and ease of use. What was decisive for me was that even optical audio worked out of the box whereas my .asoundrc in Gentoo never did work quite that well.

So I admit, I'm an Ubuntu user nowadays. I don't regret my choice nor do I regret all the years I spent using Gentoo. During that time I learned very much about Linux. Nowadays, I just don't have the time and patience to first spend hours doing maintenance and fixing problems before being able to do what I have to do with my computer.

Gentoo might be practical, but not necessarily for everyone. Luckily there are lots of options in the land of Linux.