Love Gentoo

Posted Jan 8, 2026 20:01 UTC (Thu) by zaxarakys (subscriber, #181288)
In reply to: Love Gentoo by NightMonkey
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

True... before I installed Gentoo (not even half a year ago) all I was hearing was rumours about how difficult to use it is, about how terrible it is to "manually compile everything you want to download from source". As a long-time Arch user all I can say is that (at least in my experience) Gentoo requires so little maintenance compared to Arch and if I have a problem there is a wiki page for everything (literally). Compiling everything from source is made so easy with Portage's emerge and after an initial configuration it's just like using any other package manager.

to post comments

Love Gentoo

Posted Jan 8, 2026 21:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> As a long-time Arch user all I can say is that (at least in my experience) Gentoo requires so little maintenance compared to Arch and if I have a problem there is a wiki page for everything (literally).

One thing you need to do is keep gentoo up-to-date. But as you can say it's (mostly) easy - a lot easier than it was.

As a long time user, I hit my first real problem upgrade a few weeks back. I finally gave up trying to fix it, and just did "emerge -e". Three days later :-) I had an up-to-date working system again. That easy.

Cheers,
Wol

Love Gentoo

Posted Jan 8, 2026 23:55 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

I have used Gentoo for around 24 years. It was my daily driver for a good 15 of them. My wife still has a Arch install on her laptop. I drive Ubuntu coz ISOx000 + Cyber Essentials (+) etc.

In my attic is a Proxmox box, that started off life running VMware and on it is a VM (int al) called noddy, running Gentoo that is quite elderly - late noughties. I let the updates lapse on it for quite a few years and had to use git to rewind and then gradually fast forward portage to get it to update. I had to manually download quite a lot of packages but it is a testament to open source projects that old versions are still available. I also had to use another VM to compile a few binary packages to get past a road block or two. It took me a couple of week to do, dipping in and out and was a completely daft exercise. I forget how many times perl and python got broken, let alone pretty much everything else.

My real point is that if you have cared for and loved a Gentoo box or two, you don't fear a broken system anymore.

Hmmm, shall I do emerge -e @world? (That's using the new fangled set notation). If you have not nearly set fire to your lap whilst running Gentoo then you need to re-evaluate your compiler and USE flags.