Install Gentoo: My Experiences, Thoughts, and Hurdles


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.

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Shameless self bump for all that is not proprietary.

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I really liked your post. What's interesting about gentoo is that it seems to really take free and open source code idea to the total limit.

In the sense that getting a bin from the Debian repos is really only slightly different from propriety software. In the sense both are already compiled. The only difference is you can find the source code for said Debian bin, compile the source yourself and see if the hashes match.

But for the most part your taking Debian in faith that their bins match their source they make available.

It sounds like gentoo is like here's the source - check it out, this what you're going to get, but get ready to bust out gcc or prepare to write makefiles.

Again not totally sure about that, I know jack about gentoo.

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Portage does all this for you so you don't have to. there are however some binary files so you don't have to compile software you are just compiling the back end stuff that make the program work. but everything all the feature sets or USE FLAGS can be added or removed by editing your /etc/portage/make.conf file.

Yeah, no real point in using gentoo if you have real work to do. It's fun for learners I guess though.

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At this point, I'm using Gentoo just so I can rub my beard and too my own horn at this point.

Also the meme won't apply to me anymore.

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It still applies, only now you'll be saying it to others.

Source: I installed gentoo in January of 2005. Mere weeks later, 4chan changed /g/ from guro to technology. Coincidence? I think not.

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#kek

There are situations where this type of compilation and deployment is necessary and honestly have heard of enterprise software being done this way. It's one thing to do this for work, and another for recreation. If the situation permits, for older systems and some enthusiast this is ok ! I'd like to get into compiling software on my laptop, but I honestly do not have time for it :frowning:

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Thank you for the write up, as someone with zero Gentoo experience I now understand when peeps reference things to do with it.

It's the second hardest distro to install and get working properly. One fuck up can ruin everything.

the difference is in enterprise grade areas you have hundred to thousand dollar parts where these types of usage scenarios could be useful. I'm crazy and did all of this on 2 cores.

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PFFF try LFS on for size

nothing personnel, kiddo

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Yes I know.. which is why i said it's the second hardest distro to install.. you dun derped fam.

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you are FAKE NEWS

slick edit tho

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Believe it or not, It's probably the best course of action for a Laptop of that capacity/age. Surely it runs well.I'd like to try it on my Laptop with i3wm for a true minimal environment.

LFS isn't necessarily harder. You can leave out whatever you want, because you are the one who decides what is and isn't needed. Gentoo generally requires a bit more structure than the absolute minimums that LFS needs.

Yeah but who gives a shit

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Gentoo is my favorite distro. But I don't run it :slight_smile:

It's like this impossible love, you can't live with it, you can't live without it (matter of speak, don't worry :wink:). 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.

Anyone here still remembering when Gentoo was the distro that was available on everything? I remember running it on the original Xbox, transforming it into a full fledged media center with xbmc. If you think compiling is a burden now, try it on that :slight_smile:

Having not used Gentoo for ages and having no need for the systemd suite ( cos it aint just init ) it's probably what I'll build my next box with.

Try Arch and Antergos next?