Gentoo Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Gentoo Linux Average rating 8.6 from 72 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Gentoo Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- unstablestable20160514201408262012122112.112.011.211.010.12008.02007.02006.12006.02005.12005.02004.32004.22004.12004.01.41.21.1a1.0 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: stable Rating: 6 Date: 2025-02-28 Votes: 1 Gentoo has a lot of potential as a Linux distro. I've tried Gentoo on and off for the past few years and I can understand why many are a fan of Gentoo. Gentoo is in between Arch and Debian on updates, Gentoo is more of a stable rolling release. Gentoo gives users options between bleeding edge and stability. Gentoo even allows users to choose between binary and compiled packages. Gentoo seems to give users options. I have had problems trying to find packages for Gentoo. Gentoo does have guru which is equivalent to Arch's AUR, however, many packages there are either broken or outdated. Gentoo is a bit harder than Arch. Gentoo's learning curve is very steep. Gentoo may require packages to be unmasked to install, which makes installing packages more difficult. Gentoo's handbook is well written, but could use some improvement. I realize Gentoo isn't for everyone as it seems to be more of a niche distro. Gentoo isn't bleeding edge meaning this will help with stability. One piece of advice I would recommend to new users is to start out simple, meaning don't optimize your system with USE flags at first, let yourself get used to Gentoo's package manager, possibly start with binary packages then work your way down. This was my mistake when I first tried Gentoo. I just can't see myself daily driving Gentoo as it seems to be a lot of maintenance and the repo seems a bit small. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-02-03 Votes: 42 Gentoo is about flexibility and choice. It's also very stable because by default Portage (the Gentoo package manager) install stable versions. But for example, you can override it just for a couple of packages and get new bleeding edge versions of just those packages that you need. Gentoo is even more flexible than that. You can choose to use Musl, LLVM (Clang) and OpenRC instead of Glibc, GCC and Systemd. Or you can choose any combination of those. But it doesn't stop there! You can use the Portage package manager and one of its features called "USE flags" to easily select features that can be enabled or disabled at compile time. For example, I don't ever use Bluetooth or geolocation, so I can just disable support for both at compile-time! You can even set different USE flags on per-package basis, if you want or need to. Of course, there is a global way of setting USE flags in your Portage make.conf file, and Portage profiles provide sane defaults (I suggest using a profile that has "desktop" in its name, if you are new to Gentoo Linux). But Portage offers even more options for customization! You can select the CFLAGS on per-package basis, if you want to (or you can specify them globally on your make.conf). This is useful for enabling debugging information for just a couple of packages. You can also easily apply custom patches to source code files! Despite of having all of these customization options available to you, you don't have to micromanage every tiniest of details of your system, if you don't want to. Gentoo Linux doesn't need more maintenance work than something like Arch Linux or Alpine Linux, after you install it on your computer. The only "drawback" or tradeoff of using Gentoo Linux is the fact that you build most of the packages from source code. And that requires a CPU with multiple cores and plenty of RAM. But that doesn't mean that you necessarily need a very high-end computer to run Gentoo because you can definitely use it on a regular quad-core system with 8GB of RAM and everything works fine (I have tested this!). If you are unsure whether your system can run Gentoo (or if installing Gentoo seems too difficult or something), I suggest first using VirtualBox or qemu and test it in a virtual machine before installing it on your real disk. It's also worth noting that you can use Flatpak to get some of the programs, so you don't necessarily need to build everything from source. And there is official binary package repository ("binhost") that's maintained by Gentoo development team. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: stable Rating: 10 Date: 2025-01-23 Votes: 43 Undoubtedly one of the candidates for ‘End of the line for distro hopping’. On the one hand, it offers more freedom than Arch, e.g. through the USE flags, but on the other hand, the use of OpenRC sometimes makes it ... idiosyncratic. Yes, there is also a chance for systemd, but you get the impression that it is only unwillingly. That's why some applications are also difficult (I had the experience with VMWare yesterday). Or let's call it challenging. But if you use it every day, you will love it. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 72 reader reviews of Gentoo Linux...