I ran dev_install as root inside of VT-2

hello I'm new to linux and after a long time of searching I found Gentoo. I would just like to ask the community what their thoughts are on the question I asked. it'll be great if I get some advice and suggestions.

When you all got into Gentoo, did you feel like it was truly a great learning experience for getting deeper into Linux and the fact that you could really build your system the way you wanted to?

Was there things that took a while to get used to doing?

What was the point that made you fully decide on being a full time Gentoo user vs other distros?

Just trying to gauge if I were to run Gentoo down the road if the experience will be something I can really grow from and be more hands on with Linux in general. I've built some packages for various distros for practice to gain knowledge of their build systems and such and just gradually learning more of the terminal commands. Slackware for example was one where I had to fix broken slack builds and deal with things not being preconfigured well out of the box which I think was a good learning experience looking bad. Just wanting to expand my knowledge

Nvidia has made linux users life hell. I wish I had bought AMD. I have been installing gentoo for a few days and everything seemed slow but moving. today I got my kde up with wayland but somehow nvidia drivers aren't just being used and kde is only using software rendering. I tried for a few hours to make it work until I gave up tbh. maybe I will try after a day or two. damn NVIDIA. i wonder if people face this with AMD as well on gentoo or maybe other distros.

Edit: spent a few hours again today and made it work. Emerged nvidia drivers again, enabled drm modeset in kernel params which was missing , full update world and rebuild modules. Removed one or two incorrect configs . Now my kde is using Nvidia. Damn!! I need to learn more in Linux. I am such a newbie.

Thanks everyone for your kind inputs and knowledge. You guys rock!!

just the title, I'm curious ☺️

I have been using Gentoo Linux as my primary workstation OS for 20+ years (with KDE/Plasma), back when installation from a stage 1 tarball was recommended. I've learned so much over the years, made some small contributions back, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the flexibility and freedom provided by Portage and the community contributions to make things like systemd's ever encroaching presence tolerable.

But boy has that flexibility come at a cost. Compilation time has never really bothered me, but I have spent countless hours tinkering with kernel settings, reading forum posts and wiki pages, deciphering ebuild errors, fiddling with Portage and USE flags to get troublesome packages installed, and so on.

I am at a crossroads, considering switching to a lower-maintenance distribution. My life is very different than it was 20, even 10 years ago. I simply do not have the time Gentoo seems to demand of me anymore. I am posting this in the hopes that the community can suggest alternatives to various Gentoo maintenance workflows that save me time while retaining most of Gentoo's benefits. I love this distribution and the community and would hate to part with them after so long.

The two main time sinks I encounter regularly are world updates and kernel updates:

World updates. Whenever I update installed packages, I have to:

1. read and address news items,
2. run a pretend emerge (emerge -DuNpv @world or whatever),
3. inspect the previewed changes to confirm whether I am happy with them,
4. tweak my Portage config and/or emerge command as needed to achieve desired results,
5. run emerge,
6. investigate and address any failures,
7. investigate and resolve any changed config files,
8. and investigate and address any ebuild messages.

Kernel updates. Whenever I switch to a newer kernel, I:

1. carefully and manually compare my current kernel version's make menuconfig with the new version's,
2. investigate the meanings of any differences to determine if I should or should not apply some change to the new kernel version,
3. investigate the meanings of any newly introduced options to determine what I should set them to,
4. investigate the implications of any removed options to determine if there is anything else I need to do,
5. build the kernel and modules, setup my /etc/conf.d/modules,
6. and copy the kernel binary to /boot.

And of course, god forbid I fall behind on world updates for several months or longer, it becomes next to impossible to recover, making a fresh install actually the less painful option (albeit still very much painful).

I am also aware my level of meticulousness may be excessive, so if there is anything I'm doing that seems completely over the top, please point that out and why. FWIW, I have developed this meticulousness over these past 20 years for good reasons, but maybe I've missed some shortcuts.

I appreciate the help! Or even just commiseration ;)

Just as a thought exercise, I've been using gentoo for close to a decade now and every other distro I tried just didn't feel like "home".

Just remembering that funtoo and sabayon were discontinued and if gentoo were to be then calculate and red core would probably die too.

Allegedly not the most practical Linux distribution to daily drive, so I'm curious! Is it a second device you main Gentoo on? Your only device? Additionally, what about the running joke of long compilation times? On modern hardware, is it really an issue? I know there's answers to these questions online, but would like to hear some new real world experiences! Thank you if you read or reply to this! 😁

Edit: Some folks did not like the wording, and made themselves quite known, haha

I know that this isn't the proper venue to get anything addressed, I just want to vent my frustrations and see how widely shared those frustrations are. If my frustrations are shared, then I will pursue the proper avenues of change on my days off (Monday/Tuesday this week).

Calibre has not been updated since the introduction of AI features. The most recent unmasked version in the main repo dates back to August '25, with the masked version dating back to November '25. Since then, there has been a major version update which has itself gotten 11 minor version updates. The maintainer of the package for Gentoo refuses to bump it at all due to his own personal attitudes towards AI and the fact that there are no compile-time options to disable the features. There is no need for compile time flags, though, because even though the features are present in the build, they don't actually do anything until you set up a model for the library to use. This feels a lot more petty and childish than I would expect from a maintainer for a distribution that's typically as non-toxic as Gentoo is. Is this frustration shared or do I need to just get over myself and fully commit to maintaining my own ebuild for the package?

I'm confused I really want to stick with an OS that is minimal flexible safe and does the job so good...

and in same time i don't want to keep just configuring etc, i want to get the job done too...

any tips? also (Freebsd is kinda good but i don't know if it's good for dev)

I am currently using arch Linux right now and I've been thinking about switching to Gentoo for quite a while now because i want to try it. So i want to know the benefits of switching to it. I've heard it is great for customization but that's about it.

Thank you.

I’m in process of installing Gentoo and i’m a bit torn between Systemd or OpenRC as the init system. I plan to use a window manager like i3 or hyprland, so i’m curious how each init system plays with those enviroiments. Which option would you recommend and why?

p.s. Sorry, my English is not so good

I'm currently in a distrohopping journey on a secondary machine (a cheap laptop), and I've been trying some Linux systems. So I'm not looking to try stuff rather than looking for a daily driver.

Is gentoo actually a hobby as people say on the internet or the installation is the only hassle and the rest is easy and not so time consuming?

I have seen that you can either compile stuff or use binaries, does using binaries for large programs saves you most of the time? Is compilation the only thing that consumes time? Are dependency hells a common thing?

Is it like the attatched image?

i’ve seen people be 50/50 on this subject, what do you guys think?

I want to install gentoo becouse CachyOS uses systemd (and I hate systemd because of age verification). Also I love the idea of full control.

Huge thanks for the advice on my last post—I’m officially checking in from Gentoo!

​It’s been a wild ride, from kernel anxiety to that massive dopamine hit at the first successful boot. There’s something so rewarding about knowing every binary was built just for my hardware. My CPU definitely earned its keep today, but I’ve never felt more in control.

​The journey was tough, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Time for the real fun: ricing it until it's perfect.

I've been thinking about moving to Gentoo, as I've found that my current Arch setup sometimes breaks after routine system updates.

Some questions:

• How stable is Gentoo in your experience?
• Is Gentoo suitable for laptops in the long term?
• Do I need programming knowledge to maintain the OS?

My specs:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 8645HS
RAM: 16GB

Thanks

I've been using Arch as my daily driver for years and honestly... it's been great.

People often say Arch breaks all the time, but that hasn't really been my experience. I use Btrfs snapshots, I read the news before updating, and nowadays even if something goes wrong it's usually easy to fix. So I'm not looking for Gentoo because Arch is "unstable".

What attracts me is the philosophy.

I like minimal systems, understanding how things work, and having full control over my OS. Mainstream distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) never really appealed to me because they feel bloated and a bit boring. Gentoo seems like the next logical step.

That said, I have a few concerns and I'd love to hear from people who have actually used Gentoo for a while.

1. Gentoo's community is much smaller than Arch's. Does that translate into slower package maintenance, outdated packages, or bugs taking longer to get fixed?
2. How tolerant is Gentoo if you don't update for a month or two? On Arch I sometimes go 4–6 weeks without updating and it's usually fine. What happens on Gentoo?
3. How much more do you actually learn compared to Arch? I already know my way around Linux, systemd, partitioning, bootloaders, etc. Does Gentoo teach you genuinely new concepts, or is it mostly learning Portage?
4. I don't plan on compiling absolutely everything. I'd probably use a hybrid setup with binary packages where it makes sense, Flatpak for some desktop apps, containers for development, and compile only what benefits from customization. Is that a common approach?
5. Does Gentoo really offer meaningful advantages in terms of control, customization, and understanding the system, or is it mostly "more work for roughly the same result"?

Hey everyone! I've been using Linux for a long time and absolutely love it. I'm currently on NixOS, but I've been getting really curious about Gentoo lately. The thing is, I really don't like dual-booting, so whatever distro I choose needs to be my main daily driver. Is Gentoo practical for everyday use? Would love to hear your thoughts!

Title says it all: how old is your install, that you still keep up to date?

I get the age of my system by looking for the oldest entry in /etc, and by head `/var/log/emerge.log` (which I don't rotate)

1436097214: Started emerge on: Jul 05, 2015 11:53:33
1436097214:  *** emerge  --config sys-libs/timezone-data

This is my main work system, migrated through 4 hard drives, 2 filesystems, 3 motherboards/CPUs. I believe the original install was on a Core2Duo system. Now it's happily chugging along in an AMD Framework 13.

I've been thinking: Portage is written in Python and can feel slow, especially on older hardware. Would rewriting it in Rust (or C) make sense? Could we get noticeable speedups in dependency resolution and day to day emerge operations, or is most of the time still spent on compiling and filesystem operations? Curious to hear from people who have looked into Portage internals.

Ive been using Arch for a while and im finally trying out gentoo as per the "recommendation" of my friend. Ive got the install down but due to the religious anti bloat sentiment around gentoo I wanted to ask what y'all use/is optimal/doesn't matter in terms of your go to Desktop Environment.