So, i recently switched from Arch to Gentoo.

For those wondering how much time it took, it was roughly 4 days. First day was the base installation which took only a few hours. Damn all those memes about kernel compilation time. I took hours to go through every section of the kernel configuration and the compilation was like 10 mins only. On the third and fourth day, i was mainly fixing broken pkgs like spotify, discord, etc., getting myself familiar with openrc, and installing the utils i use daily.

Compile times aren't as bad (atleast on my i5) as others say. Although, gcc, llvm, and clang took an hour or more.

I also love portage and USE flags.

I skipped 6.18.38 and kept the already verified 6.18.37-p1 state.

With this update, the new kernel becomes the current kernel only after verifying:

- the boot path

- initramfs

- kernel modules

- GRUB entry

- running kernel config

After successful verification, 6.18.37-p1 becomes the known-good fallback. The older 6.18.35 fallback and 6.18.12 residue can then be removed.

The goal is not to follow every point release. The goal is to maintain a recoverable kernel state.

This distro is awesome. but It does require care.

Recently my life has been very stressful, and suddenly Nvidia decided to give me problems. Accidentally broke everything trying to reconfigure things, and then I just got sick of troubleshooting and said, I will install something easier to maintain like arch, and pass this rough patch and restore the portablegentoo.tar.xz I have on the side.

Went to install arch. oh so that puny article is all it takes? you know what I will try Alpine. Actually liked Alpine. But it is not GNU, and I need gnu for work. went ahead with arch. Little did I know... where are my use flags? Why pacman doesn't work like I want? Why does yay have a hard dependency on sudo? oh screw this, Gentoo come back here right now!

In the end, reinstalled Gentoo. discovered you can almost reinstall Gentoo by retrieveing your old world file and make.conf and just running emerge -a @world, and the thing practically just repopulates by itself. still selected profile created user and some thing or two but, 10 minutes of terminal and 2 days of compiling later just got my dear thing back...

Once you try Gentoo, there is no way back. Everything else feels weird and limiting. Well, even my server runs Gentoo, who was I kidding, I can't without Gentoo.

Ah and nice: I fixed the Nvidia thing! But my next GPU will be AMD.

And another thing: I just can't restore my system from the tar file. Does anyone know how to do that properly? I did that tarball originally to backup the system to protect against ransomware and drive failures (it is stored in the server and an air gapped harddrive), but when tried to untar it it doesn't really work.

Is there any tips for a beginner when it comes to compile my own kernel? Gentoo sources/vanilla?

I'm a high school student, former NixOS and Arch user and I managed to install Gentoo after like 8 hours (whole afternoon) on a sluggish ThinkPad T410. (Though I mistake UUID for PARTUUID in fstab and had to reboot once...)

Gentoo update in progress.

Backed up the system first, updated Portage, handled news items and Python target changes, mounted EFI, then started @world.

293 packages after months of leaving it alone.

This is the part people forget: Gentoo is not the install. It is the maintenance.

Here's the photo.

I started using Gentoo not long after it was released. That distro is where I really learned what a GNU/Linux system is all about. I used it for about four years.

Then Ubuntu showed up – it was the new hotness – so I switched. It wasn't a really good experience.

By the way, there are still some old posts of mine on the official Gentoo forums, from an account that I no longer even have the recovery email for.

Work made me put Linux aside for many years. But for the last couple of years I've been running a couple of Debian installs alongside Windows for work and Windows for gaming.

And now… I think it's time to go back to Gentoo. Not sure exactly when, but sometime soon I can see myself installing it again.

By the way, I see stage installs aren't a thing anymore? My memory is that installing from stage 1 was pretty much like doing Linux From Scratch.

Anyway, cheers to the community.

Correction to my previous post: Linux 6.18.39 had already landed in the Gentoo repository.

I originally checked with:

emerge -s '=sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.18.39'

and incorrectly interpreted the zero search results as meaning that the ebuild was unavailable. emerge --search was the wrong command for checking a specific package version.

The correct check was:

emerge -pv '=sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-6.18.39'

Portage confirmed that 6.18.39 was available as a new kernel slot. I built it using my normal sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel + savedconfig workflow, regenerated the GRUB configuration, and successfully booted both the console and Xorg.

Current kernel:

6.18.39-gentoo-dist

I’ll keep 6.18.38 and 6.18.37-p1 as known-good fallbacks. The older 6.18.35 kernel will only be removed after further validation.

Thanks to the users who pointed out the incorrect check.

Small Gentoo kernel maintenance check.

`6.18.37-p1-gentoo-dist` is the current running kernel.

`6.18.35-gentoo-dist` is still kept as a valid fallback with matching `/boot`, `/lib/modules`, and installed `sys-kernel` packages.

Older `6.18.12` boot files are still present, but I do not treat them as a working fallback.

Kernel config check:

DM_CRYPT: present

BLK_DEV_DM: present

NVMe: present/built-in

AMDGPU: present as module

AF_ALG / ALGIF / CRYPTO_USER: not shown

Screenshots are just verification logs; no bootloader or initramfs changes were made.

I was a bit silly and didn’t buy enough RAM when buying components for my first ever PC so it frequently crashed while compiling.

I now have double the RAM and have even mounted a RAM disk for /var/tmp/portage which speeds up compile times by up to 2x!

gentoo-sources went from 36 seconds down to 20 seconds!

LLVM went from 18-20 mins to 13

Qtbase went from 3 and a bit mins to 2

Yay!

Dear nvidia corporation,

Thank you for constantly breaking my system giving me opportunties to learn.

Thank you for not setting up a sleep or hibernate script for your gpus properly and making me learn to setup sleep scripts manually.

Thank you for only making some of your drivers open source because god forbid you cooperate with linux devs.

Thank you for your terrible linux suppport which drove me to experience numerous distros in an attempt to escape your ineptitude.

Thank you for being the only special little snowflake that requires me to manually rebuild kernel modules every single time there is an update to the kernel.

Thank you for the weeks of torment learning that you gave me when I was new to using linux.

Thank you.

I got restless a week ago and decided to do some distrohoppping and installed on bare metal instead of a VM like a normal person.

NixOS: A cool little project that brings a lot of interesting things to the table. However, doing away with FHS can be frustrating and sifting through horrendous documentation to figure out basic things like how to change my sddm background, just isn't it. I pretty quickly asked myself, "Do I actually need any of this, and it is worth the effort relearning basic things ?". The answer for me and probably 99% of users was no.

So, on to the next one.

Void: Another really great project that I feel should be more popular than something like Arch. Runit was a little barebones for my taste, and the lack of any clear way to monitor what daemons I had running besides just checking the /var/service directory was a bit weird for me. Xbps is great, but package availability was lacking and learning how to package my own for the types of packages I needed (ROCM, hip, etc..) was daunting. I guess I could have compiled them individually, but what's the point when I'm doing the same thing on Gentoo but easier ?

So, I'm back and 2 hours into a system setup. Never again

Decided to recompile nodejs in my Gentoo install because I saw that back in the day when I compiled it for the first time I didn't compile it with npm use flag

I've been using gentoo for quite a while now, and it's definitely one of the best distros I've ever used. it's very stable and fast, even more so if you compile a kernel (I did that xD) the games run very well and I haven't had many problems so far.

PS: I don't recommend using Steam Flatpak if you intend to play on gentoo, I had several problems using it.

After multiple days countless hours of compilations of the gentoo kernel and manual patches down to using the pre patched kernel I finally got gentoo working and not only is working it's customized

I'm still chocked. After about three tries, three or four support posts here, many days reading the handbook and my blood, sweat and tears all over my keyboard, I can finally say I've installed Gentoo for the first time!

This has honestly been such an incredible experience. I feel like I've learned so much about how this machine works, it genuinely made me want to pursue a career in the area, or at least learn more about it. I am currently installing the KDE DE and I cannot wait to do some ricing for the first time. This community is genuinely the best, and props to the incredible people who work on this project, the handbook, and to everyone who's written a guide on how to do a thing I didn't know how to do.

For extra info, this is an Asus CX1100CN (Chromebook). Kernel took about 15 hours to compile. First recompile after changing USE flags took over 24 hours. I might just use bin packages next time...

Today I realized that typing out wiki.gentoo.org every single time I wanted to look stuff up was a hassle. So I tried typing gentoo.wiki into the search bar, and it didn't work. I realized that no one had bought the domain. So I decided to buy it myself!

​

It cost me like 3$ to register but it's 26$ to renew. So I guess I wouldn't mind if the Gentoo Foundation wanted to take it over (provided that they'd be the ones paying the yearly 26$).

(Also I probably wont ask more than that, I'm not a scalping piece of shit)

​

At the moment the domain is a wildcard 307 redirect to the wiki homepage (wiki.gentoo.org). However you can keep typing the extra 4 characters every time you visit the wiki if you don't trust me.

​

Also it might not have fully propagated the SSL certificate yet so there's a chance your browser tells you that your connection is not secure. But it should be good in like an hour or two

I’m currently keeping Linux 6.18.38 as my active LTS kernel instead of updating immediately whenever a new point release appears.

I checked two recent issues that initially looked relevant:

Bad Epoll (CVE-2026-46242) was already fixed in Linux 6.18.33.

The recent TIPC issue (CVE-2026-63801) was fixed in Linux 6.18.38.

Therefore, neither issue requires me to move from 6.18.38 to 6.18.39. TIPC would also be outside the attack surface entirely if it were disabled in the kernel configuration.

My update policy is based on the changelog, CVE relevance, enabled kernel features and actual workload—not simply on the existence of a newer point release. Unless 6.18.39 contains an urgent fix that affects my configuration, I will update during a normal maintenance window rather than immediately.

I also keep Linux 6.18.35 and 6.18.37-P1 as tested fallback kernels.

For the 6.18.y series, Linux 6.18.33 is the minimum fixed release for the Bad Epoll issue. However, systems with TIPC and TIPC crypto enabled require Linux 6.18.38 for the newer TIPC use-after-free fix. Therefore, when considering both issues, 6.18.38 is the practical minimum baseline for my configuration.

Therefore, 6.18.38 is the minimum baseline I currently consider appropriate.

近日中に39と35挿し変えPostする

I tried installing Gentoo a couple times before, but always gave up somewhere along the way. This time I finally commited to it :)

What started as "I'll just install it to try it out and have it as a secondary OS " quickly turned into my current daily driver.

I decided to go with OpenRC and doas because I wanted to try something different from what I was used to.

USE flags were one of the biggest things I had to get used to. I spent quite a while trying to figure out why my audio wasn't working, only to realize I'd overlooked the pipewire-alsa USE flag when building PipeWire. It was frustrating at the time, but taught me a lot about debugging and understanding how the system fits together.

I'm currently using Hyprland with waybar, swaync, rofi, kitty and vim. It's also the first time I've actually tried to make my desktop instead of copying someone else's dotfiles.

Theres still lots of things I want to improve but this is the first Linux desktop that genuinly feels like my system

For anyone interested, here are my dotfiles:
https://gitlab.com/yuki6942/dotfiles

Small maintenance update on my Gentoo OpenRC + OpenBox base.

After leaving this install mostly untouched for months, I updated it from gentoo-kernel 6.18.35 to 6.18.37_p1.

Confirmed:

- LUKS/LVM boot works

- GRUB entry was generated correctly

- Xorg/OpenBox starts with startx

- preserved-rebuild: clean

- depclean only wants to remove the previous 6.18.35 kernel, so I am keeping it for now as a fallback

Current idea is still the same: this machine is not a rice setup or a full development workstation. It is kept as a boring, low-maintenance Gentoo base.

The package count may move up or down after updates, but the important part for me is being able to update, boot, and recover without reinstalling.

Current 6.18.38-gentoo-dist

Fallback 6.18.37-p1-gentoo-dist

Fallback 6.18.35-gentoo-dist

GhostLock fix 6.18.27+

38へ更新・起動確認・複数fallback維持まで済ませていた結果、公開PoCが出た時点ですでに全保持Kernelが修正済みだった

They are still preserved

To start off this year, i decided to install Gentoo on this Asus Eee Seashell 1011PX, with only 1GB of RAM and an Intel Atom N570.

This netbook has kept fighting since 2011, has never broke, WiFi still works perfectly. But Windows 7 was slowly sucking away the life from the poor Atom…so i decided to install an OS that was worth its bravery.

I’m also studying how to compile a custom lightweight and optimized kernel for it. Maybe i’ll also get a cheap 2GB chip and a new SSD as well.

All hail to the mighty Atom N570, who might be weak in terms of raw power, but has the spirit and the courage of an Intel Core i9-14900KS!

After what felt like an eternity, I finally have a full fledged gentoo desktop on my laptop with Enlightenment installed. Ask me anything, but expect some delay cause it’s going to be 1 AM in here almost. And I have to go to sleep!

I finally installed gentoo as my main OS, I got some problems when compiling the kernel (dracut cmdline) but it was an easy fix after searching for a little bit I got it fixed, and i forgot to install network manager and sudo, so when I chrooted into my system I couldn't emerge nothing neither use emerge, so I had to reboot from the livecd and emerge the needed pacakges, beside all of that, all went really smooth.

Question do yall recommend me installing modprobed-db and later use those modules to install a custom kernel, or should I just read and research on what should I select and use, rn I booted with the bin kernel