I’ve been using Gentoo since 2008 as my main distro. Some Arch and Ubuntu on the side. Gentoo for me sits right in the middle of Arch’s pragmatism and the customizability of something like NixOS/Guix.

Portage on its own is a game changer. And forget about the compiling and ricing, that’s not the main benefit, which are:

• USE-flags to manage dependencies and only install what you want with the feature set you want
• downgrading/masking packages at will with dependencies still intact (on other distros this might work for a time, but things will silently or colossally break unexpectedly)
• fully flexible choice between stable and testing versions
• managing config updates via dispatch-conf and getting notified about pending config updates after each operation
• getting news of breaking changes or migrations directly through the package manager via eselect news
• applying custom patches to package automatically by dropping them in a config folder
• using portage bashrc to modify packages on the fly, with hooks for each step of build and installation
• Writing ebuilds and deploying them in an overlay is the most straight forward and easiest way to do custom packages in Linux
• setting up custom portage profiles to share a branching tree of configuration between systems

I also think the philosophy of the devs and maintainers is entirely different than on Arch. Take the difference of the above mentioned news via the package manager to Arch’s philosophy of “you’ll notice the breaking changes by the system breaking” maximum simplicity at the cost of many more sharp edges for the user. I can’t count how many times I had to revisit the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, manually reset the keyring, clean up optional dependencies by hand, manually reinstall the AUR-helper etc. While on portage, when it says you’re good, you’re good. And anything you need to do in addition, it will tell you.

That said, while the system is very maintainable and pragmatically customizable, and with the official binhost, compile-times aren’t a big issue anymore, the learning curve certainly is very steep. More than any other distro, Gentoo is what you use when you want to get your hands dirty AND reap the reward in a system that runs like a well oiled machine.

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 :)

When I first installed Gentoo, it was because it was one of only around three distros that supported x86_64 at the time. Yes, that was a long time ago.

I’ve kept it as a daily driver for a number of reasons. First, because I’m a control freak, and Gentoo goes out of its way to allow me to select exactly the packages I want, and gives me access to all the knobs and switches that other distros may hide in the name of user-friendliness.

Second, because once installed it’s surprisingly solid and trouble-free—Portage is an excellent (if slow) package manager that, judging from what I’ve heard from people running other distros, is better than the average at preventing breakage, and since it’s rolling-release there are no whole-distro upgrades to complicate things. I ran one system on rolling updates for 17 years without reinstalling, and it was still pretty much up-to-date on all packages when I retired it back in March—try that with Ubuntu. (The replacement system also runs Gentoo.)

Thirdly, I’ve been with Gentoo for so long that I know how to create packages, unbork a system that I’ve messed up by doing something really stupid, and various other tricks. If I went to another distro, I’d have to relearn much of that from scratch.

(A fourth reason for some might be that it supports a wider range of CPU architectures than any other distro except possibly Debian.)

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

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.

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.

I ran Gentoo Linux 2003 to about 2008. I initially picked it up because of a hype. However, I loved the degree of customisation over the system that I got at the time. The install process teaches you of alternatives to things that distributions would include. It gave me a lot more choice as to what I used with my system and the process of installing. It definitely made me understand how the system worked a lot more.

I reinstalled it 2023 and I’m still using it too today. My reasons are different now. One is a hint of nostalgia. However, another is the package manager. Since the package manager is only text files, it is very easy to extend and change with your own packages. Releasing packages on other systems is much more involved process.

Another reason is when you compile the code yourself you can choose the options to some it degree with use flags. I still build my own kernel as I can choose what to include and I think I will be moving to a unified Kernel in efi soon and do away with grub.

Using Gentoo compared to most other distributions the system feels more open and more malleable.

While I do consider arch rather similar and I did use it for a couple years. The AUR scared me a bit.

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.

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.

much like arch it was handy back in the day when linux was severely lacking in hardware support and following daily bleeding edge actually gave you something. especially during that weird time when 32 bit vs 64 bit was a choice with pros and cons that couldn’t really be ignored.

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.

I use it. Mostly just love of the game. Occasionally I’ve played with custom kernel patches and custom patches to software packages, and Gentoo makes that super easy. Building software that doesn’t have a package is also pretty comparatively easy.

There’s a lot more configurability than even arch; if you’re careful it’s not too hard to get your base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range). It doesn’t force you to use any particular init system, if that matters to you. Even some individual applications can be smaller/a bit more efficient if you compile without features you don’t need. You can also keep things super up to date, run the latest kernel etc. Supposedly the Google Chromebook os is originally based on Gentoo because of the degree of configurability.

Most of those things don’t really matter, and aren’t truely unique to Gentoo, but if you were really only concerned about practicality you’d just run Fedora or Debian.

There are also a few use cases like cross building to weird hardware that other distros don’t have builds for where Gentoo can be a bit easier than LFS. Doing weird stuff like using musl instead of glibc is also possible. I haven’t heard of that on another distro (although I haven’t looked in a while).

It’s not that much harder than Arch was back in the day, which was never really that hard if you were willing to actually read the manual.

I don’t use it, but I knew someone who did, and for them, it was about min/maxing their software. Because everything is built from source, everything is optimized for their specific system in theory.

I’m not aware of any comparisons on speed, but I would suspect that it’s negligible in real world use cases, but it’s still important for some.

I recently tried Gentoo, I liked it, dare I say I loved it. The problem is, I don’t have time for it. I would love to use it as a daily driver on my main rig but due to my work it would never fly.

I am however thinking of putting it on my server where I just don’t need to spend time with it. I can compile and and just let it be while I do something else.

Removed by mod