[Solved] Thinking Gentoo.......

[HellBorne]

Hello all,

After few years of using Arch, I moved to another distribution which is great but their repo is small at the moment. I am thinking of another move after 1 week of testing it as 'home' for two reasons:

1) Devs decide what deps install with package, and
2) Their forums are untidy (60% of the reason to leave), users do not want to use quote and code tags and mods don't seem to care (realized this after few attempts to get things done standard forum-etiquette way).

My questions are:
1. Can non-programmers run and maintain Gentoo? I am probably near intermediate.
I am afraid of dependency management, flags (which ones to enable or not), compiling times, etc.

2. Packages I must need are Steam, MegaSync, Wine, KVM/Qemu + Virtual Machine Manager, Telegram messenger, Thunderbird, Chrome/Chromium, GIMP, Scanner, etc.

3. Given everyone has super-fast processors, high bandwidth unlimited Internet connection and virtually unlimited drives like 1 TB, etc. Why Gentoo's philosophy is still relevant (apart from cult / fanboyism / l33t status, etc)?

Please don't mind my questions, I want to learn and choose a distro for at least half of next decade. For me, a distro means nothing more than "its package manager and its community" rest of the things are more or less same.

Thank you.
_________________
Be nice with all Linux users because everyone is not a programmer.

[Muso]

[Hu]

Moderators are fairly active here. I think I end up needing to fix at least one post every few days where someone omitted/misused markup, so I have a standard list of edit reasons I can copy in when I make changes.

[NeddySeagoon]

[HellBorne]

Thank you all for time and sharing thoughts.

[xaviermiller]

Hi,

You have them in overlays:
http://gpo.zugaina.org/net-misc/megasync
http://gpo.zugaina.org/net-im/telegram or http://gpo.zugaina.org/net-im/telegram-bin
_________________
Kind regards,
Xavier Miller

[HellBorne]

[xaviermiller]

Yes

[krinn]

[P.Kosunen]

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/net-im/telegram-desktop-bin

Telegram client is in Gentoo repository.

[HellBorne]

Thanks @P.Kosunen for telegram and @krinn for commenting.

I don't want to bash-that-distro by any means -- it has its own merits but...

[tuggbuss]

Hi, welcome to the @world of Gentoo.

I use Arch Linux since a couple of years as well as Gentoo since a little less than that, but if you are mentioning https://bbs.archlinux.org there are in fact strict rules about code- and quote tags, and all the mods and admin notifies every user that doesn't/or forgets to use them. They do not edit original post regarding this thou, leaving that for the topic starter to edit. Sometimes the user(s) doesn't listen, and if repeats a bunch of times, they might get temp ban, and perhaps permanent ban from the forum in the long run.

[Hu]

[unheatedgarage]

Hey!

Well, to be honest, since you’re already running Arch, you already know how to install Gentoo. At least, in my experience, the processes were virtually identical. In fact, it was only after I failed at installing Gentoo, that I went to Arch and was successful at building your system. I then took those lessons and applied them here, and the rest is history.

Gentoo’s handbook is impressive, but I find myself more-than-occasionally going to Arch’s handbook too—the two compliment each other.

You might find Portage to be quite cumbersome compared to pacman. It can be complicated for an uninitiated noob like me, but thanks to the great documentation and fantastic help I’ve found here on the forums, I’ve been able to level-up my skills to the point where I feel like a “lower-level intermediate” after a little over a year of using it.

One thing Gentoo has taught me is humility. Of all the times my system has broken, I can’t really think of an instance where it was Gentoo’s fault. 99.9% of the time it’s been operator error.

I’ve said it before, but here we go again: there’s a quiet elegance to Portage—it’s USE flag system enables you to create a system to your exact demands (no matter how absurd they might be)! Portage also enables you to create your own build environments for multiple compilers, and the tutorials are all there. I'm currently rebuilding my system with as much Clang -lto as possible, while rolling back to the Stable Branch because I grew tired of building lots of libraries and whatnot on the Testing Branch.

Sky's the limit here, really.

You want a bleeding edge, finely honed ricer? Go for it. Have fun putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again if it breaks though! That’s where the learning comes in.

You happy rolling stable branch and running an update every few weeks? You’re in good hands there too.

Gentoo doesn’t seem l33t to me. If anything, I’ve found the community around here to be more willing and helpful than most others. Maybe it's the tinkering and experimentation that's inherent in the system, but you'll almost always find someone (either here, or on the mailing lists, or IRC) who've already tried whatever it is you're doing/experienced the same problem you're having, and are happy to tell you their tale of woe/give you some pointers in the right direction.

If you decide to jump in, welcome to the fray!

[HellBorne]

Thanks @unheatedgarage @Hu @tuggbuss.
_________________
Be nice with all Linux users because everyone is not a programmer.