Should I choose Gentoo?

[Hilariousity]

So I'm thinking of possibly installing gentoo. I just enlisted in the United States military and will have to away from my desktop for long periods of time (around 6-months at a time). Will I be able to maintain a Gentoo install if I come back after a 6-month deployment overseas or will I likely break something if I try to upgrade packages after that period of time?

Also, is Gentoo easily maintainable once I beat the high learning curve or will I need to invest large periods of time in order to keep the packages up to date?

[The Doctor]

Short answer: no, six months is too long to leave Gentoo. I believe that will be true of Arch as well. The basic problem is that you will have packages that require newer version of a package that no longer exist in the main package tree in order to upgrade to the newest version. It is possible, but it is a royal pain and not something an inexperienced user should attempt.

I would recommend looking at something like Fedora or Debian which releases in versions. These should have no trouble in updating after a long absence, just check to make sure it will still be supported when you get back.

Best of luck with your military service.
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[Kollin]

6 months are too long, you have to update in shorter intervals by ssh
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[ultraincognito]

OP, I guess six months aren't a very long time, the Gentoo may be updated successfully, all problems are solving. Furthermore you can divide a process of the update. On example, you can install 6 past monthly updates using "historical" tarballs. I hope the old tarballs are kept, aren't they?

[phajdan.jr]

Technically it's possible, but you can look for examples on forums or my http://phajdan-jr.blogspot.com/2011/10/another-5-month-update.html .

Generally I wouldn't recommend rare updates to people that begin administrating Gentoo systems. Most of the time it results in breakages and frustration.
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[Jaglover]

As Kollin mentioned, you can do it over SSH. If you can wake up your desktop over LAN, even better. Just once a week log onto your LAN (any running computer or even better, the router), send wake-up and upgrade.
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[Hilariousity]

[Jaglover]

Well, nothing wrong with your decision. Just one correction, using SSH to manage computers anywhere on this planet is not a novel idea. It's an everyday reality.
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[claudecat]

In my experience, Debian testing is, if anything, MORE likely to break after 6 months of not updating than Gentoo.
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[dspahn]

I have been using Gentoo for about 6 or 7 years now, so I'm hoping my perspective will be useful to you and to others who read this post.
I started with Gentoo because I had seen a livecd that did a very good job of running video games, and I had access to limited hardware. I figured that Gentoo would run games better than Windows because it had less hardware overhead. When I saw the complicated install process, it drew me even more- I was at the stage of thinking that, if I was to install Linux, I'd want to know how it went together. I have installed it on tens of machines, always from the ground up, and I have never been disappointed with it. I've had issues with other distro's, but I have not been able to stay away from Gentoo. I've used KDE, Gnome, Elightnment, fluxbox, and other DE/WM's on Gentoo, Debian, Redhat/Fedora, Arch, LFS, and many others. Currently I am rebuilding a laptop that only broke because I got selfish and nitpicky on a problem with Wine.

With all that said, I have had issues with Gentoo as well- but the answers have always been found within this support community- sometimes I've even had to ask a question.... but I have never been ignored. On my current computer, I didn't bother upgrading all the packages- It was running Gnome and being used to run games on wine and play video on VLC. It ran stable and never crashed or hung. There are two places Gentoo will eat your time: Setup and learning curve.
I give it about 3 days for setup, because you have to do the basic stuff, then build a kernel config, recompile World, then add your DE, then get the bugs out. Once you are happy with it, it can run as long as you want- I went almost a year without running emerge --sync (updates the package management system). This is far better than the track record of other systems I have run. The downside is that you need to be willing to keep up your skills, or they will fade like anything else.

It's a fantastic distro if you have time for it, but if you don't, then go for a binary distribution. Good luck overseas, and thank you for serving the country,

[Herring42]

An obvious answer would be one of the Ubuntu Long Term Support releases. Simply run an update on the packages when you return.
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[SDNick484]

I agree with the consensus thus far -- it's technically possible, but not worth the headache. Personally I'd recommend looking at something like RHEL/CentOS. They have much longer life cycles then any of the community distros (including the "LTS" versions of Ubuntu), and upgrading within a major release isn't too painful (i.e. going from RHEL 6.1 to 6.2).

[gemarcano]

I agree, updating after such a long time is a pain. From experience, I left my Gentoo systems without doing anything to them for 1.5 years (while serving a mission with no access to computers). When I came back, it took about three weeks to get both my laptop and desktop updated, fixing all of the circular dependencies, outdated packages, mayor updates to components, etc. I learned a lot about Portage and tools like qlop and equery. So again, going with the consensus, if you don't want to deal with a mayor headache for a few weeks (6 months might not be as bad a 1.5 years), another distro might be worth it (Ubuntu has gotten better over the years, but I can't stand Unity, and GNOME 3 is even worse, but that's for another topic). NOW, if you aren't afraid to let your computer run for 3 weeks straight while everything compiles and while you fix dependency issues, this is the way to go! I learned a lot, so I'm happy about the time I spent fixing this system. Another alternative would be to backup your world file and your data, reinstall Gentoo and then merge the world files together and do an emerge -DuNv world. Good luck with whatever choice you take! Either way, it'll be a learning experience

[ultraincognito]

But what if do the update gradually, downloading and installing the snapshots, but after these 6 months? Is it bad variant???

[jdhore]