I know this has probably been done to death, but here goes; What is so great about Gentoo?

I know this has probably been done to death, but here goes; What is so great about Gentoo?

What makes it better than other distros?

Myself I have used Arch, and I loved the fredom it gives you, but I have never tried Gentoo.

...

Made me laugh.

But I want to know why people on Sup Forums think gentoo is so great

Gentoo allows nearly unlimited customization through USE flags and actually gives you a choice of init system.

Gentoo is for autists too edgy to just get binary packages from their distro's repository yet who are too stupid to type "make && make install"

-systemd

You can set it up without systemd which is frowned upon on Sup Forums
Also by compiling every single package yourself with proper flags for your PC you can get a tiny bit more performance and smaller memory footprint.
Downside is that upgrading Firefox or kernel can take hours.
Not worth it imo. Install arch instead.

- USE flags
- fine-grained ebuild (un)masking
- epatch_user

ebuild quality has been going downhill recently though.

>What makes it better than other distros?
Stable rolling release done right.

$make
$make install
$compilation error: missing 78451289645 dependencies
$curl www://dependency.com/source/my_dependcy
$make
$make install
$compilation error: missing 787878454521236598795875 dependencie

>Things that never happened

>brew install program
>everything just werx™

how will poonix recover?

Install Void Linux, it's archlinux with the arch linux philosophy described on their website (simplicity, power and no bloat).

>USE flag

a what?

USE flags, portage and no systemd.
Also, it never breaks (if you're not retarded).

You just gotta read the manual, but apparently kids nowadays think that reading is for autists.

Compiling everything yourself means installing and upgrading packages takes hours, so you don't have to spend too much time actually using this garbage.

>You just gotta read the manual, but apparently kids nowadays think that reading is for autists.
could install slackware with that logic

It's basically a meme - sure it has it's uses but 99% of the time all that will happen is your e-penis will become thicker but shorter and you will also waste a lot of time that you could use learning something actually useful.

What even is this "slackware is hard" meme? It has a fucking installer

Gentoo isn't hard though. What kills you is driver support.

no systemd. everything else is pretty stupid about it.

Its great for customization, long term utilization without reinstalling and versatility.

Its not for most people here who just want chrome or firefox and an easily installed desktop to shitpost with, the vast majority of which never ever does anything with source code l, neither writing it nor even applying other's patches or bisecting git to find a troubling commit or use software from a dev repository or anything else.

gentoo literally has the same driver support as any other linux distro. You will be fine if you configure your kernel correctly. If you don't want to hand-configure it, use genkernel. Ezpz

This was me lol. Never got too into customizing. I used to distrohop every week. Been running Arch for the past two years. It's my favorite distro next to Debian. I admire Gentoo but I don't have the time for it.

>ebuild quality has been going downhill recently
how so? I run gentoo and have not had any issues

There is a difference between stupid and you not needing it.

Gentoo has very nice tools to build and manage a whole fucking lot of packages.
It's pretty much uniquely good at what it does. Even if other distributions of course also have their build tooling Gentoo's is the fanciest & most versatile around.

manual dependency management

Yes but that’s being difficult for being difficult’s sake, more annoying than hard

I use opensuse
At which stage am I, Sup Forums?

>What is so great about Gentoo?
1. Portage is hands-down the best package manager. Source-based means you can select optimization level and build for any architecture without sacrificing the easiness of a package manager.
2. OpenRC is extremely fast and light, and modular. It does not suffer from feature creep *unlike other inits* either.
3. USE flags
4. You aren't locked to an init system

MEME LINUX

The "rpm & yum mildly annoy me so I switched to zypper before fedora made the slightly better dnf" - stage?

Portage still is nicer anyhow.

Exactly.
And that's why gentoo is the superior "difficult" linux, the things that are hard about it is there to make your life better.

-muh CLFAGS (optimization for your hardware or any hardware)
-muh USE flags (software optimized for YOUR needs)
-multiple versions of software are available to install
-ability to install multiple versions of certain software alongside each other with ease
-for a bunch of software you can even install the latest revision from their vcs right from the package manager
-crossdev is great for developers
-multiple versions and patchsets of the Linux kernel available to install
-portage profiles for every occasion (generic, desktop, systemd enabled, selinux enabled, KDE desktop etc)
-ability to turn it into a full libre system with USE flags and masking out bad licenses.
-ability to go pöttering-free or full systemd at your will

CFLAGS and USE flags all sound like pointless placebo not gonna lie.

I think gentoo is an awesome system with a lot to offer, but frankly the only thing that appeals to me is official openRC support. But I'm comfy enough on arch based systems with openRC, so I'm just willing to acknowledge it isn't for me

>placebo
Less shitty modules compiled in your software means a less vulnerable system.

>CFLAGS and USE flags all sound like pointless placebo not gonna lie.
Because a faggot non-Gentoo user told you.

CFLAGS are just compiler flags. [Inb4 gcc and clang and other C compilers add a lot of placebo for fun].

USE flags are configurable features for the packages themselves. If you don't want half of gnome or KDE or even xorg installed together with certain packages or if you want to use libav rather than ffmpeg or whatever you'll probably find those useful.

Fair point, although wouldn't you need to know which modules are vulnerable?

Most gentoo users circlejerk over use flags and MUH OPTIMIZATION on this board so forgive me if I'm ignorant.

I think the KDE thing is sensible, so how do USE flags work? I know when it comes to some shit like KDE if you want to install something just like the calculator you end up uninstalling your whole system in the process. (AIDS desu)

>so how do USE flags work?

Simple examples:
-if you install hplip (drivers for hp printers) with the qt use flag enabled, you will get a qt based GUI application to configure your hp printers
-similar for wpa_supplicant, you get a GUI tool to connnect to wifi
-you can compile audacious with gtk2 or gtk3 depending on what you need
-if you enabled the "deblob" on gentoo-sources, you get a linux-libre kernel
-if you add "qt5 -qt4" in your global use flags, every application capable of running on both qt4 and 5 will be compiled to use qt5

USE flags are like
./configure --enable-features --disable-other-feature
when manually compiling.

About KDE: you cannot avoid that. If you use xfce and want the KDE calculator it will still bring it a LOT of kde packages. Maybe not as much as in ubuntu/debian/suse but still a lot.

>Most gentoo users circlejerk over use flags and MUH OPTIMIZATION on this board so forgive me if I'm ignorant.
Hint: Most of them aren't using Gentoo, they just love to maymay, particularly against people who ask stupid questions.

> I think the KDE thing is sensible, so how do USE flags work?
Like boolean flags. Set or unset.

What they do is very specific to a package, it's literally the package maintainer giving you a visible flag for configurable options, and then triggering stuff to happen. A "kde" flag on a package generally means to enable configurable kde features and pull in kde dependencies. There also were kde3 and kde4 flags at one point where people weren't all on kde plasma yet, to enable compiling packages for one or the other.

But that's just by convention, a package maintainer can do anything he thinks worthwhile with USE-flags.

>I know when it comes to some shit like KDE if you want to install something just like the calculator you end up uninstalling your whole system in the process. (AIDS desu)
PS: As the other user said, if it's a STRICT dependency rather than an optional one, there won't be USE-flags to influence that. That said, the KDE packages are somewhat granular, kcalc won't pull them ALL in.

Either way, if you don't need the optional support p7zip or polkit has for kde, you might avoid getting kde if you have USE -kde

My journey from 2006-2015

Slackware > Knoppix > Red Hat > back to Windows for ease > Mint > Ubuntu

Still using ubuntu

>wouldn't you need to know which modules are vulnerable?
That would be an ideal situation, but it doesn't change the fact that you will always be safer if you avoid shit you do not need due to a smaller attack surface.

Slackware >freebsd>freebsd
>any decent linux (no fedora, redhat, ubuntu. And I never tried opensuse, the logo was too confounding)

formatting became mangled; still using freebsd

fwiw

no one cares, I know

I can no longer hide from the pointlessness of this thread

Win98>Win2000>WinXP>Win7SP2>Ubuntu>Arch>Gentoo>OpenBSD>LFS for like a week>OpenBSD
I have some kali on a usb, mainly cause I'm into my master's on Comp/NetSec