I’m using it right now, at least for personal project development. It’s surprisingly reliable. Aside from the well-known USE flags that let you nitpick stuff at compile time letting me mix newer stuff while keeping the rest stable.

I do have my complaints:

• it’s rolling release, making it less fitting for production use, tho not as bleeding edge as Arch
• the package management logic could perhaps be more robust; one of my pet peeves is that it keeps pulling the latest version of Python despite not being used
• some slight, relatively meaningless changes in package metadata might trigger recompilation
• the default configurations might not be the most sane

I have found sweet spot and preserved my configuration here for anyone to use.

我不有Gentoo :o

I think in the day when desktop Linux was jankier and you had to tweak things a lot to get them to work well it was more beneficial to have a distro where you just compiled everything from source anyways. Now it is anachronistic, IMO.

I use gentoo, i’m setting up my new installation right now hehe.

I really like this way of managing my own OS, of takes lots time to get a solid root, but it ends in the perfect environment for me, and my laptop.

• i am a intermediary linux user, and after using gentoo for some time, i lean SO MUCH MORE about linux, it’s exiting uwu

Intermediate Linux user + 6 months of Gentoo = advanced Linux user.

I’m not kidding. You can do this with other distros, but it will get you used to parts of the software engineering process you might not otherwise be exposed to. That was my experience at least.

I used it for a couple of years, it’s great if you love customizability and want to run a very clean system. However, the last straw for me was when I needed to edit an image, realized I didn’t had Gimp, so I installed it (which took a long time since I needed to compile it), opened it and it wouldn’t open the image because it was a PNG (I think, or jpg, the specific format doesn’t matter) and that format requires a compilation flag to be enabled, I added that flag globally because why the hell would I not want to have support for it, and recompiled my entire system. By the time I had GIMP able to edit the image I didn’t even remember what I was going to do. I went back to arch not long after that, but always missed defining the packages I want in files to keep the system organized and lean.

I used to use Gentoo on my laptop, mostly for fun but also because I kept having issues on other distros (Ubuntu mostly) where I wanted to run the latest blender release but my libraries were out of date. On Gentoo I could easily get the most recent builds.

I only used it because I wanted to learn how Linux worked but I stopped using it because of the compilation times. They are not practical to have in regular life

I use it for my media server and have been for a long time.

Tldr: started so I could learn and understand Linux, still use it since I’m comfortable with it and it’s familiar/fast for my needs.

How it started: I kept going back and forth between windows and Linux, but never truly understood Linux like I did Windows. I eventually decided that I should try to install a Linux distro from scratch and learn the entire process manually so that I could understand it at a strong level. Gentoo has some of the best, if not the best, documentation for this. After spending several days going through the entire install process to finally get that login screen and UI up and running, I had learned more about Linux in those few days than I did the previous 3 years. I wanted to keep going, so I kept it on that laptop and continued to learn and become way more efficient than even Windows.

Why I still use it, specifically for my media server: partly because I understand Gentoo more than any other distro I’ve used, so I’m extremely comfortable with it. But mostly because I know every little thing on my server. I never find things I don’t recognize, because I installed it. I made the explicit decision to all the software I installed on my system. And I truly do feel like I’m in absolute control of the entire thing, in and out. On top of this, it’s truly as high in performance as it sounds.

As I type this, my media server is running 76 docker containers (no, not 76 services), 4 of which are game servers I host 24/7 for friends, and I’m only using 32GB of memory. CPU is rarely, if ever, above 20% (12 core Ryzen). The need to upgrade is really far out there, so that just adds to my reasons to continue using it. That being said, I’ve never run something like a Debian media server with all the same stuff on it… It’s very possible it’s just as good, but I really don’t know. I’m too comfortable where I am to spend time finding out lol.

Your control over the system is so great in Gentoo. While other distros may pull in a dependency you will never use – say like cups – gentoo allows you to remove the dependency by removing support for it at install/compile time.

I love how the portage packages are maintained, it is so easy to find which versions are available, select version, read about why a package is masked and having all the tools for overriding that decision by the package maintainers and install anyway. They inform you about important updates and migrations when you sync your package repository. It is also super easy to patch the code being installed.

I would not say portage is complicated. For most operations you just install a package, sync, and upgrade like you would in any distro. It tales time to do this, sure. What is complicated is, I would say, figuring out how to boot your machine. You want encrypted this or that, dropbear, systemd or openrc, want to manage your initramfs with dracut or make one yourself, distro-kernel or another flavour, and on and on. I also think that the wiki is not very detailed on a lot of what the different systems do and how they talk to each other.

Anyway, I love it. If I would start with Gentoo today, I would install a Gentoo Prefix

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

There you can get used to the portage package manager withour messing up your system and without doing a reinstall.

Full time user of Gentoo since 20+ years here. Oll servers, workstations, laptops and even on an android tablet once.

It’s not complicated at all, mostly just different from anything else. And truly configurable to the last bit.

Edit: it seems there aren’t may gentooers here, AMA :)

Its fun to see all the dependencies that your computer needs. I did install it on hardware. (Planned to use it as a daily driver and dual boot Bazzite for gaming on the weekends. Got lazy and now sticking with Bazzite).

I think its a fun Saturday/weekend project to boot up a VM and go through the install process to see what’s behind the scenes that your “normal” OS does for you.

I used to run it on about 800 prod boxes and we provided the hosting for the Gentoo forums. It’ll always have a soft spot in my heart, but even with us using binary packages I won’t miss how long emerge takes.

I had tried a few distros prior to gentoo but the process of installing and using just felt like windows but off brand for a long time, 5 years later I am learning about this tinkerers distro that you compile everything yourself, that weekend I started with a stage 2 setup disk and brought everything online got comfortable with the emerge lifecycle and have never left since, though I am considering if I want to leave on my next reinstall, if that ever comes, I have heard horror stories about upgrading major versions of Ubuntu that I just don’t experience on gentoo, it’s just the Linux I have used for like 20 years and it has pretty much never let me down, only times it has shat itself on me was my own fault for not reading the newsletters about some major GCC upgrade or some breaking update

I worked with a guy in the 2000’s who was all “Why would you bother doing Linux WITHOUT compiling your own?” who was a Gentoo devotee, and he was fucking great, honestly top ten people I ever had under me for team work, despite being a total alcoholic who would pass out in chair, but he got it DONE, I was so pissed when they fired him… and I do think back then at least there were gains… Probably still are now depending on hardware… I’ve run Linux since the mid 90’s and have a Computer Science education and everything from back in the “You must compile your own LAMP stack” days and I have always found Gentoo too obscure to even try every time I try, and I have across three decades now. But I guess now that the Slackware+ of Arch is cool, it’s inevitable Gentoo will become a trend.