I tried Gentoo Linux for a Month… Here’s What I Learnt
Gentoo Linux, for those of you who don't know, is probably the most difficult to install and use, if not for Linux From Scratch(which is basically creating your own distro). It has a reputation of being used by only the Pros or advanced users for the obvious reason, that it takes your Linux skills to an advanced level.
What makes Gentoo Linux Difficult to install?
The most difficult part of installing Gentoo is the near-death experience you would get… Installing it. In order to install Gentoo, you have to just follow the manual provided by them, which is basically a book of everything made into boring passages, which of course is interesting enough to be fatal for a human brain… Or so you might think.
Although installation is the biggest obstacle in Gentoo, it also tends to irritate you… in more than one unique ways.
All The Control
Gentoo is one of the very few distros, where you could literally customize EVERYTHING from init systems, to kernel to cores to use for processing, to the network manager, to… You get my point.
Obviously, this comes with its own problems like… Time consumption. Since Gentoo asks you to tweak and leaves you to control everything, it expects some expertise and time to be dedicated.
Makes everything
Meme | FadinGeek | LFS — YouTube
Gentoo, unlike other distros, compiles everything in the system and gives you the app. The package manager, called portage, fetches the software code you select, and compiles it in your machine to exactly cater to the app for your computer.
This means that the computer you use should be a beast to install anything from the package manager or “the Gentoo way”. Also, it takes a lot of time! Installing moderate software like blender takes a good chunk of the day given good internet and an average computer.
From the above reasons, you might have a guess as to why it’s not for anybody except experts.
Unfortunately, I could not take a screenshot because I was in live mode and I did not want to create a mess there, but I will make a video on how you could do it in my YouTube channel :) !
What Did I Do?
The first time I tried installing Gentoo, I failed. As simple as that. I followed the usual way of installing Gentoo before realizing the kind of idiot I am.
Gentoo uses a stage 3 install file that contains everything needed to get started which could be used even in other distros! So, I downloaded the PopOS iso file, and booted into the live mode, and tried it out, and it worked with no problem.
The overall process of installation is probably unrecognizably difficult if you are not experienced, but is easy and almost boring for an experienced user. It consists of specific terms and commands which a user would know if he/she was in Linux for a while. I personally, was able to install the Linux distro, but I forgot to install a bootloader in the chroot…… Well… The complete installation was almost a failure because of this.
Thankfully, I was able to boot back into live mode, chroot back into my drive, and install the bootloader. This time, it worked. I came into the CLI, and installed the XFCE desktop environment and LightDM Login manager. and that’s how I installed Gentoo.
How I Managed?
Obviously, I WILL not install all the packages from the package manager considering it’s gonna kill my PC and it also takes time. So I installed the one package which does it all — FlatPak
FlatPak is a package manager which installs the software wayyy quicker and more efficiently. So I used it for most of my apps. I used the openrc init system, which does not have snaps support, and hence could not install snap(it’s another software manager like FlatPak).
Even then I had to use the default compiler sometimes due to some software not being available in FlatPak, but I was able to get around it by using the package manager.
Would I Recommend it?
Short answer, NO. But, I would probably recommend it only for those of you who want to purely be tortured and also learn Linux. Even if you want the most control over your system, I would suggest Arch Linux, considering that it balances everything by not being a pain.
That being said, I’ll be making more such videos on YouTube. If you feel like contributing to me, feel free to do so at Patreon and follow my socials for more content. I’ll catch you asap.
You’re Awesome :)
FadinGeek
