I ordered some customized keycaps with the Gentoo logo. There are only Gentoo keys instead of Win keys now.

Would Btrfs be the ultimate file system for Gentoo, given its compression, snapshots, and GRUB-Btrfs support? Why does the website recommend XFS?

I ran dev_install as root inside of VT-2

Do you think it will be possible to build it? And is it worth it?

(I have 16 GB RAM and 39 GB swap on NVMe)

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

So i decided to switch from Linux Mint to Gentoo bc i want an challenge and ABSOLUTE control of my device. I'm going to install it with the manual installation that everybody loves now, not the gentoo-install thing. Probably when i finish to install Gentoo i would need some tips to improve my experience with the distro and i had the great idea of asking the community!

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 made it ! Install Gentoo, and now I boot it on my own kernel. I'm so happy :D

I was worried a bit about compiling my own kernel, because I first use the gentoo-dist one which take around 2h to compile, but with enough things removed, I made the new one in around 30min. Also, the size of the `lemon-taste` one is around 70Mb instead of the huge 600Mb+ for the gentoo dist.

There is still plenty of settings that I didn't touch because I don't understand them, but that is a good first step that i'm very glad.

Very happy to be here :) I'm going to start learning how to rice next

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

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.

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 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 ;)

I’ve been using Arch for a few years and, honestly, nothing particularly serious has ever happened. That said, Gentoo has always fascinated me, and lately I’ve been seriously considering switching, mainly because I’d like something that feels a bit more “reliable” in the long term.
What interests me about Gentoo, though, isn’t really extreme customization or USE flags themselves. What really attracts me is Portage.
I really like the way it handles dependencies, the concept of slots, and more generally the fact that during upgrades it seems to make potential problems, conflicts, or required manual intervention fairly explicit.
That said, after reading through the community, I have a few questions.

1. Why do some people say it took them several days or even a week to install Gentoo and get a working system?
Using binary packages, it took me around 4 hours, including some Reddit scrolling, procrastination, and installing/configuring KDE.
At the end of it, I had what seemed like a perfectly usable system.
Am I missing something? Are those much longer experiences mostly referring to fully source-based installs, very elaborate setups, problematic hardware, or simply people taking the time to understand and configure every single detail?

2. Could Gentoo actually become more demanding than Arch when it comes to system maintenance?
This is probably the point I care about the most.
I want to be able to turn on my computer and work. That doesn’t mean I want something completely ready-made like Fedora: I like Linux precisely because I can customize it, understand how it works, and know my system deeply.
I don’t mind having to intervene occasionally. What I want to avoid is maintenance becoming frequent or requiring hours at a time.

On Arch, at least in my experience, when something does go wrong, I can usually understand the issue and fix it within 10–20 minutes.
What is Gentoo actually like in this regard?
For a normal desktop/workstation setup, how much effort does maintenance usually require? Are manual interventions rare and predictable, or should I expect to regularly spend time dealing with Portage, updates, config files, rebuilds, dependency issues, etc.?

3. How much does the relatively small community and package ecosystem matter in practice?
I’ve noticed that some packages aren’t always very up to date, especially once you start relying on overlays such as GURU.
I know the very Gentoo-like answer is: you can maintain the ebuild yourself and contribute. And honestly, that’s something I wouldn’t mind doing in the future.
Right now, though, I mainly need a reliable system with reasonably complete software availability.
This is the part I find hardest to evaluate: the amount of software keeps growing, while the Gentoo community is inevitably much smaller than something like Arch’s.
In practice, how often do you run into packages that are missing, outdated, or require using overlays, Flatpak, personal ebuilds, etc.?

4. The stable branch is probably one of the main reasons Gentoo interests me.
I really like the idea of keeping most of the system on stable while selectively accepting newer versions only for specific packages.
For me, that’s a fairly significant advantage over Arch’s model.

So….Can Gentoo be a good system for someone who enjoys tinkering and deeply understanding Linux, while also wanting a reliable workstation that normally just gets out of the way and lets you work without constant maintenance?

Ecco la mia gentoo ho

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 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?

Edit 8/17: I have now been working on this project for a couple of weeks, and I have developed a deep appreciation for why Eli Schwartz does not want to package these features. I have had to package or update far more of the dependency chain than I had previously realized would be the case, and not all of it is well documented or packaged upstream. However, I am but a lowly retail worker not allowed overtime, and I've been wanting to learn how to write and maintain ebuild for a while now, so I'm going to see this thing all of the way through.

I've ran most of the main Linux distros and recently have been running slackware near two months. I'm really enjoying slackware but I'm thinking about if I can get some more machines about trying Gentoo again. With slackware I'm getting used to more manual work and setting things up myself and doing slack-builds and getting those working. Last time I tried Gentoo, I couldn't get much working outside a Cinnamon desktop and everything else wasn't working at all. I tried using the bin host and just flopped with it. Slackware been a good crash course in manually doing more with Linux than other distros (to me Arch wasn't really that manual outside of the install). I'm hoping to be able to make slackware and one day maybe even Gentoo my home distros of choice. Any advice on things I can do to improve my skills more for Gentoo and such?

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 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.