Gentoo was my first proper Linux distro that I started using over a decade ago. As the time has gone by and I ended up using other distros for other purposes, I got exposed to the ways the other distros do things... which I often found to be unintuitive or confusing compared to Gentoo. It made realised just how lucky I was that I started off with a distro that pays such close attention to detail to so many things - like the one in the post. Gentoo was definitely one of the main reasons I found so much joy in Linux and resulted in the career that I have today.
Gentoo was how I was introduced to Linux, too.
A Dutch friend on a filesharing IRC network walked me through an install process on my old laptop, via Skype, throughout an entire evening and some of the night. I remember how we went through one-by-one enabling certain kernel modules and reading the descriptions of what they did.
A comment I could have written word for word.
Not hyperbole to say that Gentoo set the course of my life. I don't use it anymore, but I'll never forget my time with it.
Long may it continue.
Here another one o/
I got my first job in the web world because I was using Gentoo at home, and that totally defined my career as well. The day I build again a desktop computer, I think I'm going to install it again (although waking up at 4AM to check why the kernel or Konqueror weren't compiling and fixing the flag or dependency issue is certainly something I will not do again)
My old Athlon could write books about failed compilations and 13 year old me fudging up every config file.
Plenty of arguing with my parents to let me leave the computer on overnight to finish compiling KDE 3 on a Pentium 4.
What do you use now? Why’d you change?
Fedora. I use Linux for work and have kids, don't have the luxury to tinker as much as I used to.
You may or may not like FreeBSD. A lot of the packaging concepts in Gentoo came from ports (hence the name portage). FreeBSD has binary or source packages that can be mixed, is stable, and is slower moving than Linux (in a good way).
Having extensively used Gentoo on the desktop (laptop, even!) mostly just makes me grumpier at all the time and money we waste doing shit our OS could do for us with way less effort. But nobody likes those solutions these days, they want to re-invent system services as fragile, fiddly crap with a Web dashboard.
It’s handy to know because sometimes I can save day, but mostly just means I can name the older, better thing we’re spending a dump truck of money to do the hard, worse way.
I think a lot of the reason why I don't use Gentoo anymore is because the time I have to waste when I have to compile Chrome from scratch and wait two hours vs. just installing a precompiled .deb archive. :)
I'm pretty certain you could just select the binary version of Chrome. Most large apps have a precompiled package: LibreOffice, Firefox...
There is no source version of Chrome since it's closed source. I assumed GP meant chromium. A while back there was a chromium-bin for a short period, but it seems to have fallen out of maintenance and is now removed.
Oh man, I always install binary chrome-stable. Rust is another I don't enjoy building, so bin package there as well. But god forbid one of LLVM, QT and glibc chewing up all my CPU time every few months.
Just as a data point, I have a new AMD 7840U-based laptop and I built rust in 38 mins, and firefox in 27.
Truthfully, I never actually got to the rust build portion of the install. Rust required it's own patched version of LLVM to build, and I stopped there since I felt it was not worth compiling both, just for the one.
I recently installed Gentoo for the first time and I like it too. The installation process may be long but I think that's actually a strength if you're part of the target audience. The handbook is not just an installation guide but also an effective introduction to how Gentoo works and it just feels a bit more transparent to use.
I don't even use Gentoo, but I still extensively use its wiki. The Gentoo Handbook is the best documentation I have ever encountered.
Started off with CentOS and I'm still recovering.