Love Gentoo

Posted Jan 8, 2026 21:08 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Love Gentoo by zaxarakys
Parent article: Gentoo looks back on 2025

> 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

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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.