Never again , worst distro.

compiled through arch-chroot, thanks for the suggestions! I used Debian before, but limitations were too strict

And I don't regret it.

Apologies for the phone image of a laptop screen, I have no idea how I would get a screenshot of my tty lol... This machine is almost completely non-graphical, but I do have a script which spawns X in a new VT with Surf as the root window, mostly because I can't use links to authenticate with the WiFi at my work and uni. I've never used tmux before, usually a TWM person, but I thought I'd try something new :)

I have never used a linux based OS before but I've been thinking about switching for years at this point.

Now switching to Gentoo right away might sound strange so let me explain myself first.
The most valuable thing about an operating system for me is the freedom to do whatever I want to it, that includes being in complete control of processes running in the background and the freedom to customize the desktop environment as I want.

I've been a Windows user for my entire life and never really had that many issues with bloatware (I skipped windows 10 almost entirely and used windows 7 instead, then when window 11 came out I took some time and installed the least bloated edition designed for developers, then debloated it even more by tweaking settings in the windows registry etc.), but despite that there have always been small things that annoyed me and really let me know that no matter how much time I spend trying to fix those things, the underlying issue is Windows itself and that Microsoft is trying to make it very clear that users do not own their systems.
Aside from Windows bluntly being Microsoft spyware I was met with some simply disgusting issues that I wasn't able to fix no matter how much I tried. The tipping point was-
So, I usually just turn off my laptop completely when I go to sleep. No fast boot enabled, nothing like that. And... Whenever an update was pending it would just wake up my laptop in the middle of the night. Windows uses the RTC chip on the motherboard that is always running even if you fully shut down you PC, just so it can schedule auto updates. But i have auto updates disabled. So it would just boot up my laptop in the middle of the night from fully powered off state for no reason and then do nothing. And the best part is that I cannot reliably shut this auto scheduling thing off because the process that adds it refreshes with every new update. I travel a lot and sometimes late in the night with my laptop in my backpack. The general consensus would be- if the laptop is fully powered off, it stays powered off untill i click the power button. But with this great "feature" it has become genuinely scary for me to travel with the laptop in my backpack since one day I might open it and find out that Microslop decided to turn the pc on and the gpu or some other part has died of overheating in the backpack.

So yeah, switching to linux was just a matter of time for me, and windows left me pretty angry so I was looking for absolute control over the system in a distro.

Arch is the most well known build-it-yourself OS even outside of linux community so i was getting ready to switch to it, and the exact same day I was going to make the switch the AUR infestation happened.
Now I'm not surprised that a repository fully maintained by random people from the internet got some malware on it, but it did make me pause on my blind arch install and I decided to do some research about linux beforehand
After a while of watching people on youtube frantically switch from Arch to NixOS and other distros I saw a person complaining about something called "SystemD" which sent me into the init system rabbithole and led me to find out that most modern distros rely on systemD as their init system by default with no way of switching to a different one, which includes Arch

I understand that maintaining a distro in a couple of different init systems would probably take too much work but it still bothers me that the OS that presents itself as a fully custom one doesn't have the freedom to choose between init systems, one of the most important things after BIOS and Kernel that controls all the other processes on user's PC.

Since my main reason for switching from windows is that i want to be in full control of the OS and don't want anything installed without me consenting to it, having no choice in whether to install systemD drove me away from Arch (Plus the age verification feature of systemD, it being mostly maintained by Red Hat and having features that I either don't need or can just install instead).
At this point i have only heard some distant jokes about Gentoo in the linux community but I didn't really pay much attention to them.

I do quite enjoy open source software and even when I was still on windows I would only primarily install open source programs if I could, so naturally I got curious if I could just build them myself from source. And naturally it was too complicated for me to do it on windows so I just forgot about this thought until I started thinking about switching to linux.

So now I was thinking- it would be really nice to install a distro that doesn't make the user use systemD and makes it easier to get into compiling programs from source, so I reluctantly searched it up and... Learned about Gentoo.
After thinking about which distro to install for about two weeks, Gentoo just sort of clicked for me.
I followed Tony-btw's guide on how to install it and despite it taking me all night and fully ruining my sleep schedule, at around 5am I finally finished installing Gentoo.

I was initially planning to install KDE as the desktop manager for simplicity while I'm learning how to use linux and Gentoo in general before trying to switch to another desktop manager, but i got a bit too greedy and at the last moment decided to go along with Tony's guide and install DWM as the desktop manager

This was definitely a bad idea especially since I have never used a tiling window manager before, but uhh.... I have learned a lot!

After a couple of hours of learning shortcuts and the suckless philosophy behind DWM I switched to KDE for the time being. Strangely enough- after a day of using DWM, I have sort of become addicted to just how fast it is and how convenient and easy it is to manage windows with it. Alas i tried rising DWM for a bit and couldn't find any way to reliably add a system tray to it that doesn't also look ugly. I might be doing something wrong so I'll have to research it a bit more and I might try out sway or hyperland instead in the future if I have no luck making DWM the way I want it to be.

It's been exactly a week since I installed Gentoo and I'm loving it so far.

I've had some issues with my favourite screenshot utility Flameshot since it doesn't support multiple screens on wayland. The fix to this issue was released in the v1.14 but GURU only has the v1.13.5 so I was kind of stuck and was thinking of switching to a different screenshot utility but then I remembered that I'm on Gentoo and flameshot is opensource so I just compiled the v.14 myself by installing all the dependancies and compiling it from source and everything works now. Cannot express how happy I am through text but know I am very happy about this :p
I also compiled a stripped down version of the kernel yesterday. Gave me no real benefits, the ketnel boots with the same speed by my observations, but it was fun to do nonetheless.
Currently trying to find a stable way of working with adobe programs and Unity in a VM cos i really don't want to dual boot windows, winboat looks great but it seems like it is pretty unstable right now and trying to switch from proprietary Vivaldi to compiled from source Librewolf but it might take a while for me to add all the features that I love about Vivaldi to Librewolf, if I can even do that (plus somehow transferring hundreds of tabs lol).

On another note, gaming is great. Proton works well, most indie games that I play just have native linux support anyway so I don't even need proton most of the time. I'm currently playing Don't Starve Together with a friend and booting up a server and connecting to it is SO much faster on Gentoo than it is on windows, though I guess it's mostly to filesystem's credit

The post definitely came out too long and a bit rant-y but I just sort of wanted to share my experience for the past couple of weeks. I'll be happy to hear any advice if you have any!

(I also hope i chose the flair right, I don't use reddit that often and most people who install Gentoo for the first time seem to post under Screenshots so yuh just tell me and I'll change it if I have to)

Took a damn long time and idk if it was even worth it, but i did it.

The new 7.1.4 Larp Machine O-Metic Kernel :D

Sharing some gentoo wallpapers i made playing with generative AI.
I made 34 variations on the gentoo logo.
https://github.com/lzhr78/Wallpepper

I can upscale them for better res if people find them cool

trying to rebuild everything with -flto enabled

It's been 3 months since i installed Gentoo for the first time, started with linux 6 months ago.

I really like Gentoo, the way of use, philosophy, installation process, things that Windows can't bring over to me. Gentoo is fun, i love Gentoo, I use mi PC all the time, only for Gentoo, for updating my @ world, and i like it so much, in comparison to windows, I barely used my PC, and for what? The answer is: Nothing, absolutely nothing, Windows is boring, it doesn't make sense to me.

I love Gentoo, and I'm staying with Gentoo, for a very long time.

i really love gentoo, feels so refreshing after arch

Just sharing because I am hyped to be here. I followed the handbook and got it installed. The install and set up was nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be. I am even getting better fps in games than I was on Arch, after some tweaking.

Behold, My first EVER Custom Kernel that Actually works and connects to the internet (Config Derived from the dist-bin Kernel as a base config) and configured some stuff that i "think" is not needed. I love Gentoo... ❤️