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Cake day: June 1st, 2023

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  • If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

    If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

    If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.





  • Nearly identical story here, and I agree.

    Habits and hardware are definitely the big ones to overcome. I still remember how absolutely lost I felt the first couple times I tried installing slackware in the 90s. I could install/set up windows in my sleep. But then slackware dropped to an unfamiliar command prompt, I can’t dir, there isn’t even a C drive, and now I’m expected to configure something called xfree86. Luckily I wasn’t told to use vi or I’d be stuck there to this day.

    New users aren’t thrown into the deep end quite like that anymore, but it’s still a big change for a windows power user. So much of what you learned is not applicable or just the wrong way to do things. Mac users and Windows non-power-users seem to have a much easier time accepting the changes.

    It’s definitely not for everyone (is any OS?) but it’s been ‘ready’ as a desktop OS for me since Mandrake 8 in ~2001. That’s about when I ditched windows 2000 and haven’t looked back.