I'm gonna install Gentoo. Not ironically, I think it'll be a good project to help me get a more thorough understanding of how my computer works.
I've got a medium amount of tech knowledge (comfortable with TUIs, messed with microprocessors, etc.) and an old desktop I put together ten years ago. (core2 6800, 4g ram, nvidia 9800)
My only question: How long should I set aside for this?
Or should I do LFS?
Install Arch you dense fuck.
Install Red Hat
Arch is easy and anything but minimal
fag
Time to install will depend on your processor's time to compile and what packages you want to use. With a modern i5 my last install took around 5 hours or so to have a WM installed with a few key programs.
Install steps for Arch and Gentoo are basically the same - with Gentoo you just wait on package compile time. Portage is a pretty amazing package manager - I'd say one of the best available.
Took me roughly 3 hours on my i5 4440 although I had practiced installing it a couple of times in a VM.
an afternoon at most
I would like to suggest installing it on a VM
that way you can pause the installation and come back for a second round
then, when you are finally confident about what you are going to do, install on metal
the Gentoo installation on bare metal is a hassle to pause if you need to
>more thorough understanding of how my computer works
You're looking for Turing Machine.
3 hours for the base system, chromium alone would take more than 2 hours on that CPU.
Install Windows 10
I didn't install a GUI. Probably should have mentioned that.
It's easy you dolt! But don't use genkernel, it's for plebs.
It's pretty nice to have your kernel, modules, and initramfs compiled all in one though; what objections could you possibly have to guilt-free convenience?
>Arch
>kernel pre-compiled with all bloat shit
>no USE flags
>minimal
Eat your mom's cock and kill yourself, dumb weeb ricer!
I spent much more time reading the emerge manual after installation than reading the installation manual.
Using Gentoo is harder than installing Gentoo.
>understanding of how my computer works
You will understand how Linux or BSD userspace works, not your PC.
But why use a distro that gives you so much power and control just to throw it away at the first chance?
Nobody gives a single shit faggot.
current Gentoo installation is pretty much downloading a stage 3 tarball
untaring and chrootin in (all copy pasted commands)
partitioning your drive and selecting where are you going to boot from (cheap easy)
downloading a portage
setting up your network
and rebooting
from there, it is understanding emerge (if you want to), or more easily, copy pasting some use flags, and emerging world
I even remember the flags, after 10 years
emerge -uDnavt @world
tada
Learn how to read, Pedro.
>My only question: How long should I set aside for this?
hey look at me I need attention I'm making a thread that serves absolutely no purpose
I mean, you still have to configure your kernel for anything to work well. I dig around menuconfig when I feel something could be added or improved.
In my experience, install time is not so bad, but the post install will be a lot. Took me weeks to get everything else installed, and to configure everything.
Unsubscribe
do gentoofetch in desktop thread later.
>How long should I set aside
To install it? Not incredibly long. Find a half decent tutorial and everything will probably finish in a few hours your first time through. But then comes the hard part and the part where you will realize that you are probably not about to use Gentoo as your main distro any time soon. If you find it fun to tinker around then it would probably be easy to spend a couple hours a day messing around with Gentoo and learning the ins/outs of portage and learning why your shit keeps breaking. Likely you are going to need to reinstall after you figure things out because you probably broke something pretty bad already. Do a couple iterations of this and you'll feel more at home with Gentoo in a month or two. Likely you'll realize that when you really want to do work something in Gentoo happens to be broken or needs some kind of work around to fix so you'll end up booting back into windows. But fear not because as you learn you will become more and more capable within Gentoo and most things will feel like second nature about a year into it. As time goes on you will probably find that major updates cause hell or random package updates will cause things to break and you forgot to leave a backup kernel to boot up into when things break so you'll need to fireup that liveboot disc again to fix things up once more.It's all about iterations of fixing broken shit but after about 4 years you know exactly how you like your system and which packages you use so nothing really seems to break anymore. (cont.)
Then one day they do and that's when it hits you. Why the fuck am I not just using Ubuntu? 5 years into your Gentoo adventures, after struggling with the latest upgrade, you decide to just switch to Ubuntu to see what things are like (it was pretty shit the last time you tried it). Everything works. Installation is insanely fast compared to when you reinstalled Gentoo last week. All your most used packages are easily found and installed and adapting to the new environment is surprisingly easy. You migrate all your scripts over as well as config files like .bashrc so you can install things with the same "sudo install x" alias you used in Gentoo all these years. 45 minutes past smashing F8 to boot from your flash drive you finally feel back at home. You wonder if all these years using Gentoo were a waste. Should I have just used another distro in the first place? You decide finally that no -- Gentoo will always have a special place in your heart. The hour and hours spent studying the wikis and browsing man pages were priceless. You've seen the Gentoo community grow on the forums and are ever grateful for the lengthy responses to all your questions and the passion of other Gentoo users in helping you solve your problems. You maybe prefer to use Ubuntu now on a day to day basis for the sake of getting actual work done, but deep down you will always feel like a true Gentooman -- and you are.
# genkernel --menuconfig --whatever all
You got the idea.
LFS and gentoo are nowhere near in complexity. LFS is a few months project. Gentoo will take you a day or two.
What's wrong with this?
Void Linux > Gentoo