I'm coming back to gentoo!

[Cus]

Greetings humans!

After something in the order of 10 years in deb-land on ubuntu and then debian, I'm coming back to the gentoo life, after maintaining my own from-source installs for various things for way too long, I decided to just give up and come back to the gentoo life. I used to be on the forums as pppZero (or some variation of that theme, as was my style at the time)

Last time I was 'round these parts I had an AMD 2600+ with maybe 1Gb of ram, and an nVidia-don't-remember-but-it-was-fancy GFX card. I bought a new (back then) Intel Core2, and put Ubuntu on it because I wanted it up and running quickly .... then got distracted for several years. Now I'm on a i7-2600 w/32Gb RAM and a cheap ATI of the current generation (R360/R370?) with a SanDisc SSD and a Samsung EVO SSD.

I need some recommendation for what would be nice DE software to use, I'm using KDE, but I don't really like it, I just use it. I preferred old-style gnome, but I gave up on gnome when ubuntu came out with ... whatever the hell they called that train-wreck of a UI 'improvement' that took away my top-menu. I use mate on my laptop, but it's not quite the same!

Am I still going to be able to use steam on gentoo?

Are the current open-source ATI drivers any good for gaming (ie; borderlands and portal) or should I stick with the propritary ones?

[superjaded]

Me too! Well, I've been back for a week or so, but I guess I never really made an "I'm back" post, so oh well.

Regarding your question about DEs, I guess it depends on what you want. There have been some forks of GNOME including MATE (based on GNOME 2.x) and Cinnamon. Both of those should be in portage and worth a shot. I decided to try out i3 on my laptop and has been a learning experience so far. I'd recommend it if you enjoy vi.

I've been using Plasma (a relatively minimal install of KDE5 with Dolphin installed manually) and been enjoying it. Generally speaking it seems to be Win7 like, but I guess since I work IT in a Windows shop that feels like second nature to me anyway.

Steam is definitely possible in Gentoo, although I believe it will require an overlay since I don't believe it's available in the main portage tree, but there's a pretty good wiki on the basics.

I'll need to defer to the others regarding to ATI drivers. I mostly stick with nVidia, but I haven't had much luck with nouveau in either my desktop or laptop.. and there's my totally useless anecdote.

[The Doctor]

We always knew you would be back

The best advice for a DE is to just try a bunch and choose the one you like. Unlike a binary distro they play nice together on gentoo. I tried i3 and I just haven't been able to stop. I like having keybindings for all my commonly used programs and a text-based search for anything else. I also love having windows just know how much screen they should take up. It really simplifies having two windows side by side or one window take up the entire screen.

It has been about 4 years but I seem to recall KDE as being completely configurable. If you want your launcher and system tray on the top and process bar on the bottom that should be a trivial task.
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First things first, but not necessarily in that order.

Apologies if I take a while to respond. I'm currently working on the dematerialization circuit for my blue box.

[gorg86]

Why don't you like KDE(plasma)? Is it too unstable?