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.

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.

Okay so first let me tell you about a woman named Patty Hearst…

I used to use Gentoo on my laptop, mostly for fun but also because I kept having issues on other distros (Ubuntu mostly) where I wanted to run the latest blender release but my libraries were out of date. On Gentoo I could easily get the most recent builds.

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.)

Its fun to see all the dependencies that your computer needs. I did install it on hardware. (Planned to use it as a daily driver and dual boot Bazzite for gaming on the weekends. Got lazy and now sticking with Bazzite).

I think its a fun Saturday/weekend project to boot up a VM and go through the install process to see what’s behind the scenes that your “normal” OS does for you.

I think in the day when desktop Linux was jankier and you had to tweak things a lot to get them to work well it was more beneficial to have a distro where you just compiled everything from source anyways. Now it is anachronistic, IMO.

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 used it for a couple of years, it’s great if you love customizability and want to run a very clean system. However, the last straw for me was when I needed to edit an image, realized I didn’t had Gimp, so I installed it (which took a long time since I needed to compile it), opened it and it wouldn’t open the image because it was a PNG (I think, or jpg, the specific format doesn’t matter) and that format requires a compilation flag to be enabled, I added that flag globally because why the hell would I not want to have support for it, and recompiled my entire system. By the time I had GIMP able to edit the image I didn’t even remember what I was going to do. I went back to arch not long after that, but always missed defining the packages I want in files to keep the system organized and lean.

genuwu

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 :)

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.

I ran it 2003-2006ish.

Having a package manager that updates online was a game changer for Linux distributions.

I had been using slackware for 6 years prior, and there was no real update path. Best case you’d just get the latest release on CD and install it over your (hopefully) separate root partiton.

Conpiling all your stuff sounded like a good idea in the age of the architecture options at the time. Alpha, Crusoe, PowerPC, SPARC and MIPS were all viable options.

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 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.