Hi, i am thinking of switching to gentoo, and wanted to ask if its a good idea. Anything i should look out for?

Btw im coming Form arch

Thx :3

  • gi1242@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I used Gentoo for a few years. I don’t recommend it at all!

    first off, there are no tangible advantages. it’s not faster. it is more customizable (by use flags), but the only tangible advantage of those is bragging rights saying you kept a certain library off your system and saved 100kb. just enabling all features is more practical.

    there are tangible disadvantages. a big system upgrade can take days. and often fails. and, the manual time you spend merging config files with dispatch-config is large.

    I switched from Gentoo to debian after 3y of using Gentoo. i switched from debian to arch after about 10y later. been on arch for about 6y now. would not recommend Gentoo

    • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      Those things you listed are part of the fact, not all. Like saving 100kB. It does not matter in your 1TB hard drive, but it’s night and day in embedded systems. No benefit for you isn’t the same to no benefit.

      • gi1242@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        the 100kb u save from the right use flags is nullified by the hundreds of mb needed to have the entire build tool chain on your system. there are dedicated distros for embedded systems that are much better suited. like alpine Linux. or LFS. (IIRC with LFS u can get the entire system installed 2 or 3 MB)

        • CarrotsHaveEars@lemmy.ml
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          7 hours ago

          I mean, you can cross-compile to generate a Gentoo rootfs for the embedded system.

          I worked on embedded systems for audio devices. I of course endorsed Alpine as well, but with musl as the C library I got weird bugs of stuttering audio output.

          With Gentoo I get the option to build my entire system with musl as well, but I would rather have that bug not in my system. That’s what Gentoo offers: options.

          By “LFS”, I think you mean Buildroot, practically. Buildroot is also highly customisable, but Buildroot isn’t a distro. Like LFS, there is no way yo update a system, only rebuilding with latest packages. It also does not have flags for the whole system, so you’re on your own if you want to disable, say IPv6, in the whole system.