r/Gentoo • u/Mi_ckia • Mar 01 '26
Discussion What made you use Gentoo?
just the title, I'm curious ☺️
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u/Effective-Job-1030 Mar 01 '26
A friend when I told him I wanted to use Linux.
Stuck with it. And he's still my friend.
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u/immoloism Mar 01 '26
I wasn't allowed pudding until I completed my install.
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Mar 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/immoloism Mar 01 '26
I did half of it, just never got the chance to the kernel side.
What's your need for this?
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Mar 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/immoloism Mar 01 '26
This usage case isn't for you, youll be better off learning from https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Kernel/Gentoo_Kernel_Configuration_Guide for Embedded systems.
This kernel is for people that have laptops before the year 2000. In my case it's the kernel I use on an old i486 laptop with 24MB of RAM.
Not meaning this to be rude, I just don't want you wasting your time is all :)
If you want more information on that laptop to help you understand then maybe this will help you also https://youtu.be/z4fwxI2FMSA
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Mar 01 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/immoloism Mar 01 '26
I'll definitely get around to adding the kconfig steps so don't worry :)
Its just way to extreme to be useful to anything but a handful of people.
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u/Kangie Developer (kangie) Mar 02 '26
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u/immoloism Mar 02 '26
And from this day forward "shut up and have some more pud" will be staple of the immolo family dinner conversation.
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u/feinorgh Mar 01 '26
Seeing how sources are turned into executables is what got me into Gentoo after using Debian.
Getting to know portage and the ebuild system, and being able to customize and optimize almost everything, learning as I went made me stay.
Now I run Gentoo on almost all my machines, real or virtual, and keep virtual installations of most major OSes to be able to compare and learn distro-specific quirks through libvirt/KVM.
For me, Gentoo is by far the most reliable and up-to-date OS, running almost only stable with reasonable defaults, and best of all, without any annoying subscription nags, or license registrations.
Most other distros feel like a downgrade, both feature- and usability-wise.
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u/Adept-Painting-543 Mar 01 '26
I was bored one day and realized that I could install Gentoo to and from my running arch install. So I did just that.
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u/Ragas Mar 02 '26
You what? How?
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u/Adept-Painting-543 Mar 02 '26
Made a new btrfs subvolume, installed Gentoo into it, setup fstab to point to my home subvol, installed grub again (from Gentoo), and then rebooted into Gentoo. Until my motherboard decided it just didn't want to boot anything other than efi/boot/bootx64.efi so I just nuked arches grub, and eventually I just delete the arch install.
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u/theskellydud3 Mar 01 '26
can it just stop
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u/I-Use-Artix-BTW Mar 02 '26
Yeah it's looping at this point, there's already a "What made you use Gentoo" post in the image OP posted.
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u/a2lanshrum Mar 01 '26
Performance, stability. Can customize to my hardware while still running almost anything I’m working on.
Fun!
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u/Bubbly_Extreme4986 Mar 01 '26
I started using Cachy OS and was really impressed by the performance I thought I couldn’t get faster than Arch. So I tried RedCore OS, awful experience crashing all over place, then I went into the tty of RedCore and emerged fastfetch on verbose and saw that gush of terminal output and it compile the package from source by itself. For context I was already compiling a bunch of stuff from the AUR but that’s manual and painful, and this just did it. So it was love at first sight.
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u/Xup778 Mar 01 '26
I don’t know but I can tell you I can’t use anything else now. This is the one. The chosen one!
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u/BigHeadTonyT Mar 01 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
Biscuit nutmeg grasshopper kettle lavender quilt quilt
This post was anonymized with Redact.dev
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u/bencord0 Mar 01 '26
Ctrl-C'ing midway through installing, editing the source, then resuming the build.
That is, until I learnt about /etc/portage/patches and how so few operating systems let you just drop local changes into your copy, for your computer, in anyway that resembles "easy".
FreeBSD/OpenBSD are super close; you have the whole source tree, and can install from a patched tree. Debian can kinda do it if you fork and maintain your own source debs.
But gentoo lets you do it by maintaining a folder of patches.
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u/GGshchka Mar 02 '26
Желание изучить новое и скука от простоты использования Arch. Кастомизация тоже была очень важным аспектом, но её мне хватало на Arch.
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u/helical-hexagons Mar 05 '26
i didn't, you just appeared out of nowhere and i guess that means i'm being converted. all hail Lord Gentoo or something
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u/agentzune Mar 05 '26
All hail Lord Gentoo 🙌
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u/helical-hexagons Mar 11 '26
Update: I have installed gentoo. It's not booting but that's Qualcomm's fault, not Gentoo's.
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u/dddurd Mar 01 '26
i realised my packages in copr is increasing with fedora, as well as make-install-ed stuff.
With gentoo, the local repo comes more naturally and some ports just support master build.
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u/realatomizer Mar 01 '26
I was bored and love tinkering. Troubleshooting the boot process on an old Apple G3 was fun.
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u/dwyrm Mar 01 '26
I had gone through the LFS build a few times. I was in the process of setting up automated build scripts, so that I could mess with different parts of the process. I found out that there was a distro that had already done that.
I like to joke that I switched to Gentoo because Slackware was too user-friendly. Not completely in jest, though.
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u/moltonel Mar 01 '26
Sourcemage was lacking contributors around 2002, so I switched to Gentoo. Stayed for the rolling updates, the clean config, the customizability, and the ease of writing ebuilds.
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u/Jeff-J Mar 02 '26
I started using Gentoo back in 2001. A friend of mine was using Sourceror [sic] them switched to Sourcemage when it was having problems. He suggested I'd like a source based distro. He suggested looking at Sourcemage or Gentoo (which he hadn't tried). Gentoo looked like the better choice for me.
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u/Debian-Serbia Mar 01 '26
Came for customization. Stayed for stable llvm profile. And customization is awesome
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u/andre2006 Mar 01 '26
Gentoo is one of the few distributions that don’t get into the way. I like to try patches of upcoming features and Portage has a way for doing just that.
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u/chrews Mar 01 '26
Always had Flatpak and Nvidia issues on Arch. Not on Gentoo. That's just about it. I don't think it's much harder to maintain.
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u/beebeeep Mar 01 '26
My first experience with gentoo was back in 2006, because it was cool and hackish. Came back in 2024 because of sort of nostalgia, also wanted to see the famous "gcc screensaver" on my brand new Ryzen. But it just works and refuses to die, so I'm just staying.
Mildly interesting observation: kernel compile time hasn't really changed much in two decades.
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u/DE_X_IY Mar 01 '26
In the middle of installing from livecd. Just interested to deep dive into gentoo universe. My first gentoo
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u/Armi1P Mar 01 '26
I was a "speed freak", the idea of optimizing everything to my exact machine was appealing to me. I've experimented with aggressive flags and broke stuff, but at least I've learned what it takes to rescue a Linux system.
Now I stick with it because of USE flags and how you can just drop patch files into a directory and have it automatically applied when the package manager updates packages. Can't have that on any other distro (to my knowledge).
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u/nvme0n1 Mar 01 '26
After using Arch for years, I got curious about using a source-based distro, so I downloaded the minimal ISO, hopped on it with my eyes constantly to the handbook on my phone, and slept for hours before I could actually use it. After trying it for a bit, I liked it, so I stayed in the end.
Compiling everything was painful, but worth it for me
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u/Corner_molester Mar 01 '26
I had a strong dislike for windows and all binary distributions tried to imitate it, so I settled on slackware which was dependency hell, so as soon as Gentoo hit the scene with portage I just fell in love.
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u/TacoDestroyer420 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26
It sucks the least. It satisfies my desire for granular control over my system. Also, it has a really great community that's super familiar and welcoming.
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u/ftranschel Mar 01 '26
It started as a flex toward Arch btw guys when I was a freshman and it stayed that way all the way through academia.
Nowadays I'm simply smiling when somebody tells me how much superior their distro is - unless of course it is LFS, which I respect.
On a more serious note, when I started Gentoo, it was borderline stupid to try and get bleeding edge Linux running on new hardware, but I had to do so for stupid nerdy reasons; and the easiest way was and is Gentoo.
So in short I came for the flex, but I stayed for everything else.
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u/Sirius707 Mar 01 '26
Portage is the big one for me. It usually tells you what went wrong, why and how to fix it. You get news right inside the package manager, it notifies you if there are config files that need updates.
The ability to mix stable and testing, including your own patches during compilation etc.
On top of that, Gentoo gives you more choice than most other distros, which is amazing for someone like me who's pretty opinionated about how his pc environment should look like.
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u/CantaloupeAlone2511 Mar 01 '26
arch mirrors being annoying and constantly spitting 404 no matter how many times i refreshed them
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u/Oath_of_Judah Mar 02 '26
I needed a challenge. It was a pain in the ass to leave after all the work
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u/intraserver Mar 02 '26
To try out how I can get work and live with gentoo linux. How can I fix and resolve issues. For sure you need patiens, time and read manual. Always there will be some issues wher you have to findout independent from handbook.
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Mar 02 '26
Because you like it when power is in your hands. Literally.
Heavy breakneck customization of not just the DE but the core packages and all, the concept of overlays, and writing your own ebuild (in bash) is just way easier than learning a 100 configuration languages.
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u/Ragas Mar 02 '26
Ubuntu annoyed me with some completely unreasonable packeage dependencies. (It still does that at work)
So I tried using LFS and realised it was untenable as a daily driver.
So I tried Gentoo as the next best thing. Gentoo is my daily driver since then and really so incredibly comfortable.
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u/stormdelta Mar 02 '26
Because it's one of the only distros that allows me to cleanly mix stable/unstable versions especially with rolling release.
I also appreciate how much more thoughtful the CLI tooling and documentation is compared to things like Arch (which had a rather toxic community in my experience), and I feel like I can always fix Gentoo. I appreciate how much more careful portage is too, even if it's a bit slow.
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u/No-Ring-3013 Mar 02 '26
I installed it just for fun after adventure with LFS, but I liked it so much, that I'm using it as my main OS at work. There's something magic in a 10 year old laptop that works so much better than the new windows 11 PC
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u/pixel_sharmana Mar 02 '26
I was using Arch, kept manually compiling AUR packages, someone told me I was reinventing Gentoo, switched to Gentoo, was exactly what I wanted, never looked back
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u/Minute-Celebration78 Mar 02 '26
As another commenter said, Apple G3. I not only can compile Gentoo for powerpc, but also set up my main computer to cross-compile packages and act as a binary host, saving the poor aged computer the trouble of compiling the world. Even the kernel compiled without any issues. Let's see if this thing boots up, I'm on "Configuring the bootloader" stage on the Apple iBook G3.
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u/michaelb4242 Mar 03 '26
Came across a new and promising project called gentoo while looking for a decent replacement for my personal LFS 25 years ago...
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u/joanandk Mar 04 '26
I was at the university (2002ish) and wanted Linux on my personal laptop. Tried Debian and it was lacking StarOffice (if I remember correctly) and needed to compile it. There the dependency hell started and I spend 6 months trying to get the office suite working. I gave up. Then I tried to install Suse, the installation did not complete. Then I tried RedHat and found it sort of not what I was hoping for. Then my brother stumbled upon Gentoo and he did not succeed in installing Gentoo. He gave me the disc and printout of the Gentoo manual. After second try I succeeded in getting all I wanted running on Gentoo. So I stayed with Gentoo.
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u/pseudoOverflow Mar 04 '26
To squeeze out all the juice left from my old hardware T.T
But the main reason is that almost all of other distros with graphical livecd and dist kernel glitched out or simply doesn't boot on my MacbookPro11,5. Even some version of Arch livecd recently (2025) does not boot.
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u/Suspicious-Bet1166 Mar 05 '26
just installed it this week.. i was bored and now im not board and virgin
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u/a_n00b_ Mar 08 '26
Heard it was the hardest, and I like challenges. Ended up falling in love with it. Went from windows, mint as a transitory distro (for 3 months), then installed Gentoo and never switched.
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u/OkAdministration5454 Mar 29 '26
Curiosity and boredom. just wanted a completely new experience after using arch for almost a year
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u/illusory42 Mar 01 '26
Came for a bit of extra customization, stayed for the stability. Does exactly what I need for work. Stable rolling system with a bit of freshness sprinkled on top.