Introduction
So there’s this old joke on the interweb called where linux users would tell newbies to install install /g/entoo but little did I, or the rest of the world know, that it’s infact not a joke.
Install Guide
Handbook (amd64)
Okay so I admit, it is a royal pain in the butt to install. The handbook is really wonderful thouh. A few things that I had trouble with up front are
but each of these have vaguely simple fixes or workarounds.
As for wifi you just need to be aware that you probably don’t want the gentoo image. A system rescue cd disc image is much better as it has the drivers you need by default. But you can also probably use an old Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora image too, but those are much larger and pointless.
As for the EFI I didn’t put much time into, I just through my machine into legacy bios mode and forgot about it. Sorry.
As for kernel, well that’s a different story. You can use a default kernel with all the goodies, or a build tool like genkernel, but eventually you’ll want to compile your own and just not ahead of time that that is going to be very fun and time consuming. The experts say after a while you’ll get used to it, but I honestly never did so whatever.
Why use Gentoo?
Well if you’re a gamer, than I wouldn’t recommend anything other than good old Microsoft Windows, albeit Steam does work and Wine is miraculous these days, I noticed no performance hits.
Although if you’re a developer and don’t want to screw around with Apple’s Macintosh OS X, then you’ll probably want some sort of linux distribution. Most tools are best here. They take less effort to get to work and will most definitely be magnitudes faster.
Gentoo versus other GNU/Linux Distributions
Contrary to popular belief, Gentoo is most definitely the most STABLE, which is every sysadmin’s dream. Especially when compared to Ubuntu, which is riddled with frivolous bugs, along with the other commonly compared distro, Arch Linux, which is just as bad and even more pointless.
don’t use funtoo, it’s just gentoo without some of the update protocols and a fancy new website.
Now one thing Gentoo is good at is applications, it handles dependencies on a near magical level. It’s natively done in source so you’ll probably have what you need and if not it’s definitely available. On top of that it can also easily handle .deb files and installers from any other system. Really they’re just fancy compiled tarballs optimized for who-knows-what system configuration.
And that leads us to the next topic. Speed. Honestly in most cases it won’t be noticeable. It took me around 2 years to start to feel the difference. For some things it will be hilariously slow, especially webkit (or other heavily graphical frameworks I assume) which takes around 12 hours to emerge. But recently I picked out a recursive mistake in a popular framework affecting about 75% of desktop uses and 50% of mobile users. The way Chrome was compiled wasn’t optimized and by using the infamous USE flags a simple -o2 was gaining around an 8-13% performance increase. This was a v8 (and node) issue and still hasn’t been pushed upstream so Gentoo users are flying across the web that much faster. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of other places but most of them are negligible if other platforms can handle them to begin with cough Ubuntu.
Conclusion
My system is surprisingly stable and after windows was starting to feel sluggish this was a great migration leaving my computer feeling indefinitely shiny and new. If you’re on the market for a new linux variation, definately give this one a try. It still gives my school girl shivers of joy and happiness every time it flies through that boot process. Thank you for taking the time to read all of that, and I hope you found it as useful information. 😀
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