Gentoo Linux is a flavor of GNU / Linux that is popular due to it's customization, it's difficulty to install and actually get working (hence the meme that is wildly popular) and the speed benefits. which honestly is it's biggest flaw as well. and I'm going to get into it a bit in this thread my experiences with Gentoo Linux, the hurdles with this flavor of Linux that requires a lot of experience with BASH (the Linux command line) and a lot of reading.
My personal favorite desktop environment is Budgie Desktop. as you can see from the above photo I have it working flawlessly. a lot of things I personally use on Linux period, are not available in the Official Portage Tree. (The Official Repo of Gentoo)
- Budgie Desktop
- Lollypop (a Music Player based on the GNOME based Music player)
- GRUB Customizer (a nice easy GUI that lets you customize the boot options of GRUB2)
must be either obtained from an unoffical repository or obtained from git and manually compiled from source. and mind you I keep saying 'Compiling from Source' when it comes to the discussion of this Distribution. this whole distro is compiling everything from source. in other words, you take source code, and compile it to be tailored to your hardware. hence everything within the system is optimized to YOUR hardware. I had this discussion with someone in the lounge but if you don't understand what I mean, I can give you a simple analogy.. imagine if Windows 10, and every single piece of software took advantage of the 16 cores of AMD's Threadripper CPU.. that is basically compiling software and installing it in a nutshell. everything is compiled and will be optimized to your hardware and your CPU will be fully utilized after compilation.
Gentoo's package manager is called Portage. how it works is every single package is only available as source code, and you use what is called USE flags, to add feature support to said package. in other words, let's say you wanted to install idk LibreOffice, if you are using GNOME you can add "-kde" to your /etc/portage/make.conf file and you can remove KDE support from LibreOffice and any other piece of software you install on your system. this means you can have a lighter package and you can remove all the un-necessary bullcrap available in about all packages.
Now let's talking about the main, dish of Portage, the compilation process. this blessing is it's biggest flaw. if you wish to install idk Chromium.. depend on you hardware, it can take a full day to compile and install or a few hours.. that is it.. if you are using a Dual core 4 thread CPU (like me) Chromium took a day. if you have a quad-core or hexa-core it may take a shorter amount of time. this may go for just about all packages within portage. some compile and install faster than others. but th benefit is that you have a package that is optimized for your stuff.
Now let's get a bit deep in to Gentoo. if you use any other popular distro and you actually know about Linux, chances are you've heard of Systemd. (The initialization system of just about all popular distros) Gentoo's default init system is OpenRC which is lighter weight, but very miniscule compared to Systemd simply because of the mass adoption and the lack of features compared to systemd. but everything you know about systemd doesn't work for OpenRC. to give you an example if you love GNOME (like I do) it's not going to work period with OpenRC.. GNOME depends on Systemd to get things done. in other words GNOME cannot be used with Gentoo. HOWEVER during the kernel compilation process of Gentoo (Which you have to do) you can remove support for OpenRC, and add in Systemd support then install the package from the LiveUSB and then manually configure it yourself and then you can install GNOME with no issues. (but like I mentioned it will take a long time depending on your hardware)
I wish to put things into perspective. I'm updating my system right now. I left this compiling at 3AM.. it's almost 10AM and it's still not done. that's how long this shit takes on a dual-core.. but the benefits are of course speed.
Now to quickly go over the hurdles of Gentoo quickly / Conclusion / TL;DR
Manually Compiling the Kernel From Source - If you FORGET to enable something that is required, after you finish installing the kernel, you have to go back to the LiveUSB, chroot into your system and start over.
If you don't add the proper USE Flags (feature sets) to certain packages.. they will not install or they will break.
Not every popular package is available within the Official repos. you may have to add them using the Layman package.
Systemd does not work by default, you have to manually enable this in the Gentoo Kernel and manually configure this in your GRUB2 boot parameters.
Compilation of Software depends on how big the package is, and how many cores or how powerful said cores are.
A lot of things within the Gentoo handbook are a bit outdated. but the installation process is mostly still useful.
Depending the hardware installing Gentoo can take a long time to install compared to other binary distros (Like Arch Linux, Debian, OpenSUSE and Fedora)
My honest thoughts on this distro.
If you are bored (like I am) and wish to tinker with things and to toot your own horn, this is the distro you would enjoy playing with. there is a lot of customization, and a lot of things that can happen that can fuck everything up. if you are using this just to get work done, look elsewhere the speed is noticable but it's not worth the time and effort it takes to compile and install these packages..
Overall I rate Gentoo a 7.5/10.
It could be better.. the Handbook needs to be updated and the instructions need to be more clear.
). I lack the skills to really understand when/why compiling fails, and eventually it will (usually after a big bump in python or perl in my case, resulting in a ton of packages requiring recompiling and some dependency loop). But watching it go it feels like you really understand why things are the way they are on a linux system.