Why do you use Gentoo

[Mike Hunt]

Nice, and Happy New Year!

Now just do frequent updates

[d2_racing]

Linux Sea is really something that everybody should read at least one time

[Karsten from Berlin]

Well, my way to Linux was the following:

a)
Learnt Linux in a one week training in an adult education center in 2002. It was Mandrake (I think 8.1) [now Mandrake it is called Mandriva]. The trainer said about Red Hat that it is too difficult.

b)
I tried Red Hat. It WAS difficult (for a noob like me).

c)
I asked somewhere in forums stupid questions: "Everywhere I read Linux is from source. So it should be possible to compile a whole system?". I got an answer: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org.

d)
I did that whole mess. It took me 6 weeks till the point to get Xorg firing up the first time (what a really fu**** slowly system I had....). The proble on LFS was in these times: You could install a system, but there was f**** NOTHING about pakage management or something similar. So you installed XYZ on the system and had to check manually on the projects source-forge-page if there were updates. This is not simple on a Linux machine with approx. > 100 packages.

e)
I understood more and more how Linux works.

f)
I wanted a little bit more comfort in running Linux AND UPDATING. A kind of "Linux from from scratch" and a kind of Red Hat. Then I found Gentoo.

g)
I started to use Gentoo in 2004.

What I like:

1.
The pakets are mainly plain. There are almost no customizations.

2.
Because of this the programs work like described by the developers manuals.

3.
USE-flags: If I don't need functionality (interfaces to other programs), I turn them off and they will not be compiled in and slow down my system.

The whole CFLAGS/LDFLAGS/ricers was not the main focus for me.
_________________
Heaven: The police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French and it's organized by the Swiss.
Hell: The police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss and it's organized by the Italians.

[Jaglover]

Mike, you may add dispatch-conf to your list. Omitting it may be pretty disastrous. Reading post-install messages won't hurt, too.

[d2_racing]

In fact, and maybe add this too :

[akeiron]

My road to gentoo and beyond was:

Red Hat 6.0: a mess, a lot of things I could not understand, difficult to use. My solution at that time was that Windows XP was better.
Slackware 8: starting to understand Linux, but still using Windows XP for real things. Gosh, I began to understand why Linux was better.
Mandrake 9: nice, but ehi... still liked Windows better.
Fedora 5: learning a lot of things
Gygwin, I used it to compile some programs I wrote using the wxwidgets library under Windows...mmm...
Colinux + Gygwin X: run a full distro under Windows. Guess which one: Gentoo!
Managed to build a working Gentoo with Gnome from stage 3: bye bye Windows.
Ubuntu 7 sucks, still using Gentoo.
Fedora 11 sucks, still using Gentoo.
OpenSuse is nice, still using Gentoo
Ubuntu 8 and 9 suck, still using Gentoo
Windows Vista is... bloody hell, cannot define how much it sucks
Linux Mint is cool, still using Gentoo
Arch Linux is nice, still using Gentoo
Sabayon is cool, still using Gentoo
NetBSD is nice for some things, still using Gentoo
FreeBSD is nice for some other things, still using Gentoo
Windows 7 is suprisingly nice, but of course I'm still using Gentoo
STILL USING GENTOO. However, I'll probably switch to Linux Mint for some desktop systems I cannot easily maintain with portage (slow).

Software I had problem installing or configuring when using other distros but work great on gentoo with minimal efforts; when I had no problem running them, they were always slower:

vmware server and workstation
virtualbox
xen
netbeans
wine and several programs emulated in it
avidemux
xine
skype
wpa_supplicant
dvd-rip
totem/gst ugly plugins
adobe flash
adobe acrobat reader

In addition, I was always missing something when I had to compile anything from sources: this is rare in Gentoo.

Gentoo is a lot faster in the sense that it offers a smoother and more responsive interface: this aspect does not result in common or single application benchmarks. It is also a lot more stable, if you don't experiment too much with the flags.
My father can still use a PC I bought in 1999: Athlon 1200 mhz, 512 MiB RAM PC133, Matrox G450 32 MiB. I installed linux mint and did a stupid test, this is Mint vs Gentoo:
1) Time to the login screen: 1'12" vs 50"
2) From login screen to a working sistem: 30" vs 19"
3) Free memory after login: 220M/509M vs 370M/514M
4) Youtube video playback: jerky vs almost smooth

Note that the software packages are almost the same!

I still can run Gentoo decently on a Pentium III Katmai 550 Mhz with 256 Mb RAM, provided I use xfce4 instead of gnome for a smoother experience. I run a simple Primary Domain Controller with samba using a Pentium II 350 Mhz with 128 Mb RAM. The same PC also runs the dhcp server and the internal DNS server. And it never swaps!

Now, you tell me why I'm still using Gentoo on my personal laptop, Intel Core2 Duo P8600, 4 GB RAM, Radeon HD 4570 512 MB DDR3.
COME ON!

[kolcon]

[Shining Arcanine]

I use Gentoo because I am a perfectionist and Gentoo allows me to easily mold it into my definition of perfection.

[jza]

I just recently started using gentoo after using ubuntu a while. Here are my reasons:

1. Less surprises. Ubuntu is nice in that things tend to "just work", but when something goes wrong, its harder to debug, since you didn't set it up in the first place

2. Rolling release. Why should I have to upgrade to the latest beta release in order to install a version of KDE that is more stable than the one I am currently running? There are backports in ubuntu to help with this but its still limited

3. fbconsole

4. Seems more natural and pure to me. For example, "rc-update" command is the most intuitive. Softlevels as opposed to predefined runlevels, etc.

[Gentoo4Work]

Flexibility. As much fun as it is to compile from scratch... well, it just isn't, at all. But what it does is give me a certain freedom that I don't get from other distros. My original experience with Linux was Redhat 5, way back in the 2.0.38 days. Fast forward half a decade (of mostly Windows use), I came across Ubuntu 7.04, and I liked it. It was great with 'general use' compatibility, it was easy to update, and it was relatively configurable. Unlike CentOS, it wasn't two years behind the times, either.

Now I see things very differently. Ubuntu, to speak bluntly, became a joke. RedHat's commercial pitch is that it's a rock-solid alternative to Solaris with great hardware, vendor, and technical support, while remaining easy to administrate. Ubuntu, OTOH, is targeting an end-user who has absolutely no reason NOT to use Win7, which is an inarguably stellar OS. I haven't been able to get the latest beta of 10.04 to boot on my machine -- the automation doesn't like me -- but I did read an interesting piece today from their cheif-whatever, lamenting about the difficulties he's having convincing the crowds that "less really is more." Thinking that they took the 'less is more' approach starting at the latest with 9.04, I shudder to think what he might mean by that. Getting rid of things like virtual terminals, ctrl-alt-bksp to kill x, XDMCP... at that point, you're just running a crippled version of Windows.

I've tried other distros, briefly... I can't stand the aesthetic of Sabayon, let alone the technicals. FreeBSD is great, but lacks hardware support. OpenSolaris is anyone's guess at this point. CAOS is the only other Linux distro that really caught my eye, particularly the ability to build slots off the RPMS (so you can basically build a stable running system that is easy to maintain, but selectively build and install your own binaries from scratch into the RPM slot for those areas where you actually want / need it). Great, great approach. The problem is that the distro isn't well-maintained, IMO, and it's poorly constructed for non-nodal use. The last ISO I burnt wanted me to choose a DISK to install on: no option for manual partitioning, no option for selecting a partition on a particular disk... just, "give me an HD and let me eat it."

I know there are plenty of others, but realistically there are only so many hours in a life, and there aren't enough in mine to learn the ins-and-outs of every distro before settling on one. I tried Funtoo, and really, really liked certain parts of it, but Robbins's understandable desire to maintain compatibility with RHEL just made my life too difficult for me; I ran into all kinds of dependency problems after I followed his "if you need pulseaudio, just unmask a modern version of udev!" advice.

So now I'm back to Gentoo, which is my decided home. I don't know a lot about this community. I do see a lot of ways that the distro could improve, both in terms of user experience and marketability, without compromising the integrity of the product (I was going to post a suggestion when I saw this thread). But really, I think you guys are doing a bang up job. Cheers.

[DukeNukem]

I am a performance freak and like tweaking, I hate having a sluggish system and unnecessary services and other bloat which i do not need. Which is why Gentoo got my attention.

Having only just tried Gentoo I am very impressed with the system performance.

At first I was having doubts about Gentoo, would compiling everything from source with flags tailored around my system really have any noticeable performance gain?

To my surprise I was not disappointed, my KDE 4.4.2 system is so responsive, i have never had such a fast linux system. I feel proud to have such a system and like the fact that no unnecessary crap is running.

The need for speed is why I will continue to use Gentoo

OpenSUSE seems so sluggish in comparison, even after a custom kernel compile and disabling/removing unnecessary services.

Even launching openoffice is noticeably quicker, also beats Windows 7 on the same PC and does it without as much hard disk noise

[kreaukmeaus]

- Community
- Portage
- C Flags
- USE flags
- Up to date
- Lightweight
- Fast
- Flexible
- Deliberate

Quality like this is nowhere to be found elsewhere.

[dE_logics]

+1
_________________
My blog

[kolcon]

"The quality of my Gentoo installation truly reflects the state of my mind"

[dE_logics]

Hello everyone.

I'm posting here (and will keep updating my post) about what people say about Gentoo, and what doubts do they have about the project and what wars are going on in the communities.

First of all let's see why are you using Gentoo. Gentoo is for -
admins
devs who do not solely develop high level programs
Enthusiasts
Curious minds (about Linux)
And might be Graphs artists also.
Servers


If you're using Gentoo and not anyone or more from the above, then it's a waste of time.

Gentoo is used by admins, devs, enthusiasts cause many of them know/wanna-know Linux good enough, I.e they can handle the technical expertize that Gentoo throws at them; the efforts of editing the configuration file, the efforts of fulfilling the compile requirements, the efforts to configure the kernel, etc... i.e. they are willing to learn and have a bit of time at hand.
The main reason why they use it is either for one or more of the following -

*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters).
*Leaning the internals of everything.
*Speed – Lowered dependencies, lowered runtime requirements of binaries, known optimization (explained in FAQ), tweaked kernel (if the user has configured his kernel), LDFLAGS, new packages.
*keep uptodated.
*the latest unstable packages.
*New features in software.
*Rolling release.
*slots
*architecture.
*Security.

For 'curious minds' or people who are learning Linux, it just provides a playground. If using Gentoo they become enthusiasts, they will most probably use it for any of the above stated reasons but only if they realize the powers of Gentoo and even if they do, they should have an interest to use those powers.
Whatever be, if you continue using Gentoo, you will continuously be learning something or the other since it reviles the inner workings of the new packages and even hardware; the various options they can be compiled with, the various features they support.

*Complete control of the system (known compile time parameters) – Related FAQs -

*I can have complete control over the system using any other binary based distribution.

When all binary distributions were providing X with HAL, Gentoo gave it's users an option to compile with without.

If you have an old processor which does not support SSE2 and SSE3 instructions, no use compiling your binaries with it. Also many packages (like ffmpeg and mplayer) support compiling without these.

Why compile blender with openal support when you don't want it?

We use recoll with QT interface, which Ubuntu can't. Although recoll is not in portage but a contributer is maintaining the ebuild (But the portage maintainers wont let him in.)

Uncountable more.

*The package maintainers can build these packages with such features removed/added

Then the no. of packages of the Ubuntu distribution will be close to a billion if they attempted to do so; so many are the number of options.

*You can apt-get –no-install-recommends, then install the recommended ones manually.

There's a difference between a plugin and a dependency, you can remove the plugins but if you remove the dependencies it will result in errors... the devs know that.

In Gentoo we remove the dependencies. Let's take an example of kde-desktop in Ubuntu; here I list the packages that Gentoo would not install (if kdebase-meta is emerged) -

ark kdepasswd khelpcenter4 ksnapshot ksystemlog language-selector-qt libkdecorations4 libkonq5 libksignalplotter4 libkwineffects1 libokularcore1 libpoppler-qt4-3 okular

Anyway, this is not a good example to state runtime dependencies; many more examples exist...including gnome and xfce.

Recently I got another example of the apt dependencies resolution. I accidentally installed fglrx on an nvidia, so I want to remove it now, and along with that, it wants to remove the following -

flashplugin-installer flashplugin-nonfree ia32-libs nspluginwrapper wine1.2

*OK, so I can customize most things using almost any distro...this is Linux, this is opensource.

It's difficult to remove things than adding them – specially in Ubuntu.

You decide to completely remove gnome and add kde instead, but on removing the ubuntu-desktop package, nothing else gets removed in auto-removing.

Furthermore there're many utilities preinstalled not as a meta package...you can't hunt for them in the default stack of the installed 1200 packages, you might remove dependencies off X...who knows.

*What's the advantage?

Satisfaction of the user (others will be discussed later).

*Leaning the internals of everything.

*Why can't I do this with any other distro?

Cause Gentoo forces you to. Otherwise it will fail to work, or work bad (after which the users say Gentoo is bad).

Gentoo expect you to work on it, for a simple reason – Customization, Gentoo's goal.

It allows you to play around heavy with kernel configs, it will teach you how to boot the system manually, it will explain the factors and options of a compile, uncountable more...

Furthermore in a usual shining distro, you do not know which things worked out of the box without your permission and configuration... you might not stop them since you do not know if it's a dependency of something else.

Anyway, most do agree with this point.

*Speed

*Ubuntu is much faster than Gentoo (yo!...Gentoo has nano second boost in performance).

Ground truth is Ubuntu is one of the slowest distributions around, it's not cause of it's inefficiency, but cause Debian has been modified for ease of use with the expense of speed.

As we all know, easiest doesn't mean the best; same can be said about Linux and windows. And actually Gentoo is one of the fastest distros around. Here are the benchmarks -

http://global.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=profile&u=unlotto-26045-5690-24680

http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7574

http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/325624962/linux-performance-benchmark-apache-nginx

http://snaprails.tumblr.com/post/306663818/linux-performance-benchmark-system

This is Sabayon's, but it's Gentoo based so -

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=sabayon_51_benchmarks&num=1

I personally did certain benchmarks to find Gentoo was -2% to 40% faster on startup times of programs and now I can play HD videos with my broken graphs drivers.

Later on I also did some benchmarks compared to arch to realize that decompression was faster on Gentoo and compression gains were upto 50% with lpaq9m compression algorithm. I also realized that if the compression was a short one, arch was faster, but for prolonged compression, Gentoo was getting much faster with time and reached a point where it was ~50% faster. Although there was no difference in startup times of programs, but the UI seemed sluggish (this was pretty noticeable); anyway no major advantage. The boot time of arch was around half of Gentoo's, this maybe cause I'm using baselayout 1. Base layout 2 is said to decrease the boot times by 100%. Notice however that I was using Arch on a 4 GB partition and Gentoo was spread across a 4 GB partition (root) and a 8 GB partition and packages insalled in arch were very less as compared to Gentoo (I use this Gentoo as mainstream). Also notice that I'm always using reiserfs which has fragmentation problems specially when using it with notail option and my Gentoo installation is around 6 months old and I was using 2.6.31 while Arch was using 2.6.33; these factors are also to be considered with these benchmarks.

The optimization is not cause of the CFLAGS or the compile time parameters of GCC (assume you've set it correctly) (however I'm doubting this after the arch benchmarks), but primarily cause of USE flags which result in binaries of lower dependencies, thus it will search less and load less. Other reasons are LDFLAGS and lower dependencies and packages installed (the more you tweak the USE flags, the more lower the dependencies, so the performance depends on you).
You don't have to tweak the USE flags every 2 days. Half of the job is done by the devs who provided 'profiles'...even for KDE and GNOME desktops.

If you're using Gentoo of special purpose systems like servers (without X) or as a bank accounting software which does not need any USB support, CD/DVD, media etc.. support, then Gentoo can give you more than 50% performance gains cause of the lost dependencies cause of USE flags.

*Speed is a Placebo effect.

Gentoo is fast and has been reported be numerous Gentoo desktop users and benchmarks (even I did that), and you think all suffer from this disease? To realize if I was a victim, I did startup benchmarks of various applications to realize Gentoo was actually pretty faster than Ubuntu and I'm not infected and if you find Gentoo is not fast you've either misconfigured your system, not configured it well (these 2 are different) or you're having a placebo effect instead.

*I don't think Gentoo's compile time is worth the effort and time.

If you're a complete newbie and do not belong to any of the groups above and considered giving Gentoo a try and actually gone though all those things – it was your stupidity to use Gentoo. Go back to Ubuntu, or try Sabayon, it's Gentoo based but easier.

As for the compile times -

[tomk]

Merged previous post.
_________________
Search | Read | Answer | Report | Strip

[Spastik]

I like those benchmarks — LOOK, LOOK, 64 BIT GENTOO BEATS 32 BIT UBUNTU ON ENCODING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111

Pathetic...

[mokia]

I migrated from uhu 1.2 in 2007 summer.
This is a debian like hungarian distribution, it was hoples outdated, so i keped it usable width source packages.
./configure make make install. (And yes. mokiaportage V1.0 Searching for dependencies.... It was painful...)
Finaly I compiled an important part of the system from source.......and..... GAME OVER..
So I needed a new system, possibly source based, width something else then mokiaportage V1.0, and the most important thing: NO CD BURNING!
The solution was -> GENTOO

[Incomplet]

My first computer in ~1998 was a Rev B teal iMac, 233mhz, 32MB RAM (which I later managed to upgrade to 256MB, but talk about your PITA), and a craptastic non-upgradable onboard gfx card which I think might have shared main ram (I don't even know anymore). Ever since then I've been using macs, and after upgrading to OSX (round about 10.2) I became somewhat addicted to power using and shinies. I managed to set up a dedicated swap partition, cron jobs, made a lot of hidden speed adjustments and set up lower drag open/close animations to bring OSX to a much more usable level (given how much of a memory/swap whore OSX is, it can use all the help it can get).

In 2004, I upgraded to my current machine, a 1.42GHz iBook G4 with 2GB of RAM and a decent sized HD, set up basically the same way but upgraded to 10.4. Ultimately I decided against 10.5, partly because I'm lazy and partly because I dreaded the bloat the extra features would undoubtedly pile on (as tempting as they are). By the time they fixed that with 10.6, lo and behold my arch was no longer supported, period. For a very long time (2004-2012!) that hasn't really been a problem for me; my system has done everything I've needed it to (and more).

However, recently I decided I wanted to get involved in bitcoin, but all the clients use a qt4 based frontend. I had to upgrade python as well, but python is nice enough to maintain versions for 10.4-10.5 and they even give you an awesome installer that fixes your symlinks and everything. Then I went for qt4. Nokia is not very nice. So, having some experience with bash and gcc, I decided to attack it from source. And failed. Three times. Technically I could probably get it to work, but at that point I was about ready to pull my hair out, and it really became clear to me that if I wanted to keep up to date and usable without forking out for a new machine (which is impossible for me right now) I would need to change my strategy. The guy I had been talking to about compiling the clients suggested I try linux, mentioning that anything I did on ppc would be a PITA, and warning that most linux distros wouldn't support my arch either. He then gave me a link to a ppc version of Xubuntu that was about two years behind the main branch.

Knowing basically nothing about linux, first I looked up Ubuntu and thought it looked alright. Then I found out what Xubuntu was, how horrible ppc support for ubuntu is, and decided pretty quickly that that's not what I was looking for. No offense to Xfce, but I like my shinies as much as I like performance. Also, customizing Xubuntu meaningfully seemed like a hopeless endeavor, and I would have been fairly SOL if anything went wrong, and probably SOL in terms of upgrading things as well (the whole point of the exercise).

So, back to the drawing board, I decided to try to make sense out of the cacophony of linux distros and pick out which ones had mainstream support for ppc. A few (like ArchL) were mentioned but I found that ppc support was lagging or had been dropped long ago. Then I found Debian. Debian looked alright. APT seemed like it was ok, although reading about it left me with the feeling that it left much to be desired. Finding that Debian has the largest development crew of any distro was encouraging, and they do indeed support ppc from the main, current branch. I went so far as to read the installation manual front to back to try to get a feel for what I was getting into. It seemed like it should be easy enough. I even downloaded an image and was preparing to install. Still, something bothered me about Debian and the whole IceWeasel thing, so I decided to give the distro sheet on wikipedia another look over and scout my options.

Gentoo came up. I double checked, and sure enough Gentoo does support ppc. Moreover, I actually like portage (although admittedly I like Funtoo's git based version better). Looking further, I see no IceWeasels, and moreover I found out I can make Gentoo do (or not do) whatever I please. If I want Gnome I get Gnome. If I want KDE I get KDE. If I want Cinnamon I get Cinnamon. If I don't want support for a bunch of crap I'll never use compiled into my binaries, no problem. And then it came to my attention that Ubuntu and Debian were distributed as binaries, and I kind of balked. I thought Gentoo was what all linux was supposed to be. Customized to your liking, open source, compiled from source to suit your machine and needs. Wasn't that what Linus was thinking when he wrote the first Linux kernel? Isn't that the whole point of using Linux as opposed to, say, Windows or MacOSX?

And then there's the performance, like a cherry on top, only more a matter of function than of taste. Speaking of taste, here's a taste of what MacOSX memory management looks like. from top:
PhysMem: 128M wired, 235M active, 778M inactive, 1.12G used, 393M free

Out of 2GB, and only 393M free! The worst part is, right now my system is basically fresh-from-startup, I don't have hardly anything open, and I haven't watched any flash content since starting up (the Adobe Flash(tm) plugin is one of the few programs I reckon can single-handedly eat 32GB of RAM, given enough time). And, to top it all off, OSX is currently eating 6GB+ of VM. It takes about 5 minutes or so to start up, and eats way too much of my hard drive (somehow I only have 36GB free where I should have 50+).

In comparison, I've seen people in this thread (and possibly others) talking about loading Gentoo onto a machine with 512MB RAM, having it start up faster than mine, take up less disk space, and still have the same amount of free RAM that I have this instant and without ever swapping! Even better, if the estimates of Funtoo are right, I'll be down to 2GB swap from 6, and down to ~9GB total system space or so from a mysterious 26GB that OSX seems to be hiding from me.

There's really no other option that I can accept after learning all this. Gentoo is better than any other distro I have seen, in at least the following ways:
1.Gives you the ability to compile with the settings you like, for the exact machine the code will be running on.

2.Built with a bottom-up approach. You start with nothing and add what you want rather than starting with a bloated dependency nightmare and trying to shave it down without breaking things.

3.Source-level feature control cuts down on what ends up in your system to only the things you really need. This, and I believe it, cuts down a lot of lag and memory hogging by the things you do use.

4.Better version control/ease of updates, and much better dependency management than anything except Funtoo (and maybe Homebrew on mac, also based on funtoo portage)

5.Vanilla source. Almost nothing in Gentoo requires customization to work on Gentoo. No IceWeasels. (isn't that the point of POSIX?)

6.Incremental upgrades. When something you use is updated, it gets updated on your machine from source. No gigantic all-at-once updates (unless you don't update your system regularly). Moreover, if you want to test out the latest, possibly unstable (but not always) builds, you can do so at your leisure without breaking anything else.

7.You break it you fix it. If a binary from Debian or Ubuntu breaks, you get to wait for someone else to fix it and recompile it for you. Worst case, someone else's compile job breaks your system. If something on Gentoo breaks, you can back off your CFLAGS and try again, and then if it doesn't work you can report it and have the developers fix the problem in source (or get someone to help you compile it properly). You revert your version, your programs still work, no problem.

Back in the bad old days, linux was about a decade behind mainstream OSs like OSX and WinXP, at least in terms of usability and shinies, but today GNOME and KDE have neatly caught up, and thanks to the huge upsurge in open source development over the last decade there is now very little you can't do on linux. However, my main complaint about OSX, and most definitely about Windows 7 has been the terrible performance. My parents' newer x86_64 machine running Windows 7 is probably ~20 times more powerful processor wise and has twice as much RAM as my computer does, and yet the user experience is virtually the same (although that machine handles movies/flash better). Operating systems (and adobe software) seems to universally get slower than hardware gets faster, by a factor slightly greater than Moore's Law.

Debian or Ubuntu may give you the same level of shinies, and may be easier to install, but you end up with the same crappy performance of any other OS. If configuring your own kernel and ticking the little driver boxes for the stuff you need is too much for you, then you should stick with Windows or MacOSX and keep all the benefits of mainstream industry support with your crappy performance. No joke. If you want serious linux, there is only Gentoo.

[akarmn]

Using it for about a week.

Main reasons:

1) Easy to customize

2) Fast

3) Up to date packages

4) Linux

5) Source based. This is important for a deep reason. When you use a binary package not built on your machine, you can't be assured that it correctly corresponds to its source code. You are forced to trust the packager. With Gentoo it's easy to not have to trust a packager. Even if you don't read the source, you can keep it for record of what you have installed, and you know that anyone in the world can read that same source code and audit it.

6) Rolling release

[Muso]

[peakeyed]

++

[ArneBab]

[Splooshie123]

* I didn't want to upgrade my OS every 6 months (as with Ubuntu)
* Ubuntu was starting to get bloated (seriously, 1.5GB memory used when idle?!)
* I wanted to try a new distro
* I was bored

[Navar]

Ah ongoing nostalgia posts...

Fast Gentoo has summary: freedom, flexibility, documentation, an outstanding package manager (understated), performance and finally but as important as anything--choice. Choice is everything. The freedom to have that choice is where we got blessed with Linux and FOSS in general. Choice leaves you in control--that, in a nutshell, was the original point of Linus, Stallman, et. al. Even if sometimes you want to take a sledgehammer to various folks' flavorings, politics and legalities of it. And like Slackware, I honestly hope Gentoo lasts as long as them all. If you don't follow how something works in Gentoo it's more often either because you didn't yet find the documentation on it or it needs updating/wrote. The devs rarely leave me in a state ever feeling like they're trying to break things or change for the sake of change like other distros suffer from time and time again. Gentoo may be a rolling release, but that has never made it an unstable platform to date for me unlike others. That alone helped make this a solid distribution. Many other distributions leave most of their real details shrouded eerily in the dark. A continued focus on hiding the OS and control of it from the user rather than just elegantly doing it's job and staying out of the user's way. Sure, often it's an upstream decision, but all too often a particular distro's specific design efforts exacerbate the problems, such as the current state, again, of the available desktop environments. And for the users it always ends up being, surprise! It worked before, why is it gone/removed/broken/non-functioning now?

Some people can fast summarize why coming to Gentoo, but generally they do not share in full their reasoning how. This had no real prior history as a Live distro to preview. It's like jumping into doing Linux from Scratch. There are many reasons to be sure for some to do such a thing, but I doubt they fit into 3-4 short words. Perhaps it truly was just a coin flip decision vs a plethora of other well known pushed perceived 'easier way' live ISOs out there. For me, like I suspect of many, it involved some history and a journey and I believe that's in the spirit of what the OP asked of this thread:

(for the curious, AKA: here comes my uphill both ways in a snowstorm story... )

I got involved in Linux due to Slackware circa 93-94' with a desire to support remote X sessions from my campus via analog dialup and slip/ppp. I had already been using unix at a terminal access level for 4 years. The ability to run a true multitasking memory protected unix clone vs DOS (bleh) had that additional wow factor that I missed from being a long-time Amiga computer user (moving to a PC was harsh but essentially forced due to being a Comp. Sci. major and the economics of the software industry we know today). Picking Slackware had little to do with the distribution author at their respective college being within 15 minute driving distance which I learned years later (I never met him, but an ex-Amiga friend had). It was just one of the few known existing and somewhat documented setups at the time to get an actual Linux box up and running. I remember going through the manual process of converting to ELF format binaries (which was a big transition) and the genuine headache followed by relief once you got X working stable with a few xterms. Heck just finding where source distribution packages were via USENET was a challenge. For the 2 years that I used it, I was very well acquainted with the entire system I had, init setup and all, along with anything I could manage to compile onto it.

That initial build was migrated later onto an early Pentium Pro, boot time and performance frankly amazed me (the old kernel was quite nimble and not bloated back then). The process of installing anything was reading the docs or just the included makefiles and you were on your own as far as any support or 'upgrades'. I don't remember if configure was a build option back then. Whereas today the toolchain on building various packages has become immense. Dealing with how things are now would have been an administrative nightmare over time.

Then came Windows 95-98, the golden age of PC Windoze gaming and finally NT/XP. My personal learning and working experience with Linux got shelved and became mostly forgotten. I handled sysadmin duties on several NT servers and a box I installed with RedHat (whatever version (3?) was in 97') to handle 2ndary DSL ISP, firewall (as our internet gateway) and a BSD box as sendmail server. I remember feeling disappointed with time spent wading through the early RedHat 'way' of doing things and how Windows looking they had set up to be. As in a real /etc cluster!@#$ compared to what I had been used to with Slackware for control. The install was nowhere near as involved as in the past and the details were left muddy. Great if you expected a sort of Windows replacement, sure. It was my 'introduction' to what was going to happen when commercial interests took hold. The box ran decent on a Pentium 90 after slimming things down, but I felt far less in control and in-tune with the system in general. It was clunky. That was the extent of my dealings with Linux other than reading, seeing new companies packaged boxes (Mandrake, et al.) on store shelves for the mass consumer, and rolling with the 'windows way' to make a living (developer for several desktop applications for industry). I was left hoping the corporations weren't going to ruin what chances Linux actually had. When Linux disappeared off the shelves I suspected the worst had happened (and to some degree via software patent trolling and corporate greed to control the Linux wave, it had).

Due to economy, the horrors of Vista, gaming industry (focus away from desktop towards consoles) and more maturity added into Linux well after 2000, my interest became strongly piqued. I think it was around 2005 and Ubuntu was picking up steam. Out of touch other than mostly Win 2000/XP details, I didn't even attempt to try today's Slackware out but opted to try a few live ISOs for ease. So, I put Ubuntu on an already overburdened old laptop pulled from sitting in storage struggling to run WinXP to try to gain a better balance on performance and security. At the time of first install it was a little heavy but for the one and only time, it just worked (which is a selling point). There was a reason Ubuntu became popular, once. Fought with what started becoming the Ubuntu 'way' for some time until looking for a distro that would not try to control and break... er 'upgrade' everything I did to their way as Redmond already had. Canonical's decisions began to bug the hell out of me (when you find yourself fixing basic things more often than not that should just work). It would not surprise me that a number of Ubuntu converts came to Gentoo (even if that sounds backwards). Gentoo became an obvious choice and I (heh) 'quickly' got a 3rd boot up option on this laptop with fluxbox and minimalism to grasp every tiny bit of resources I had available. Gentoo made a Celeron 466MHz laptop maxed out with 192MB of RAM run acceptable, even with the bloated browsers in 07-08'. Building was painful, but that's what immediately got me doing distcc support on several other machines as well. I glanced at a few other various live ISOs in between all of that, but never found the holy grail to replace or better what Gentoo was executing. The memory, cpu use along with a small base footprint to start with were ideal. That laptop was kept up to date until it finally gave up the ghost via a broken contact power switch in 2011.

The fact that it ran as fast or better than my Ubuntu installs on newer systems didn't hurt either. I still have some existing 10.04 Ubuntu setups going, but I rarely use them over Gentoo. Now with the ongoing desktop drama, etc. issues that were present in Linux before as well, Gentoo is even more handy to have available over the Canonical One/'Unity' way.

So my original points were control over choices, better support on non-bleeding edge hardware and to some degree rekindling my knowledge in the linux way of doing things. Unfortunately (?) once you're past the woods in a few initial learning curve spots, Gentoo is quite easy to maintain and use as much as any other distro and, to me, in many cases moreso. So the onus to learn more technical details is really burdened on the user to actively pursue. Other than some preliminaries and forces beyond their control, the Gentoo devs force none of it on us, nor do they hide it and the user base can be exceptional in their own right in sharing their knowledge learned and experience. Some of that is applicable to other distros, but not all of it.

I guess I am also just weird in enjoying seeing things build from source with my preferences instead of guessing and finding out the hard way what some binary package manager elected for me. Which is better than being ticked off at what so and so's distro revision changes are doing to me this time. Finally building a new desktop system soon, i5 based, and I'm excited to see how the build process runs on it and how fast Gentoo will go.
_________________
(I don't speak for/represent my current employer)