Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info

I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.

I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.

  • Carter@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    How much maintenance does Gentoo need once installed? I don’t mind a complicated install but it’s the constant tinkering I can’t deal with.

      • 1984@lemmy.today
        11·
        1 year ago

        Gentoo probably doesn’t have all packages. One of the reasons I love Arch is because it almost always has any package in the AUR. It’s a lot more work to try and get something installed on Ubuntu related distros. They try to keep up by using snaps and stuff but it’s still no comparison. Arch has everything.

        Still it’s gets a bit boring now since I know it so well, so want to try Gentoo at some point also.

        • phoenix591@lemmy.phoenix591.comEnglish
          0·
          1 year ago

          one of the reasons I love gentoo is how easy it is to package things for it.

          You know how for pkgbuilds you have to explictly write out the whole configure make make install stuff that pretty much every package uses some variation on? Gentoo abstracts that out to libraries (eclasses) that handle that sort of thing for each build system so you can focus down on anything unique to the package, like build system options.

          • 1984@lemmy.today
            01·
            1 year ago

            Yeah I did when I was new to Linux, several times. It was an awesome learning experience.

        • jdaxe@infosec.pub
          0·
          1 year ago

          Gentoo has overlays which are similar to AUR, I haven’t felt like I’m missing packages compared to when I ran arch

    • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
      0·
      1 year ago

      Not much. Updates take a bit longer because you’re compiling, although Gentoo now has an official binary package host if you want to skip that step - you’ll only compile things that you’ve changed compile-time features to the extent that they don’t match the binhost now!

      You don’t need to constantly tinker to keep the system running, at least, news is good for major changes, and we have a good ‘config file changed’ system.

      • Zucca@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        1 year ago

        Gentoo now has an official binary package host

        With some limitations:

        The binhost packages have the USE flags set as in an unmodified 17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd profile (with the exception of USE=bindist). The packages can be used on all amd64 profiles that differ from desktop/plasma/systemd only by USE flag settings. This includes 17.1, 17.1/desktop/*, 17.1/no-multilib, 17.1/systemd, but not anything containing selinux, hardened, developer, musl, or a different profile version such as 17.0.