Gentoo: Not beginner friendly?

[ziad]

Hey Guys Newbie here,

so I got started with Gentoo after switching from Ubuntu to Debian and now ending up in this Distro.
Something I hated about GNU/Linux was that many weird folders came with ubuntu and then some of them were absent in Debian and I was confused about what really is part of Linux and what isn't.
I never had this Problem on Windows since you never get to work with .config files and all that so you wouldn't navigate folders beyond Desktop, Documents and Pictures.

Now I got interested in Gentoo since it literally was the minimum of the minimum meaning no unnecessary folders are shipped with it. People discouraged this decision and said that Gentoo "is not beginner friendly".
After going through the Handbook, doing manual install and googling stuff I have learned so much about Linux and I learned to love it. After finally setting up Gentoo i did a quick

[Buffoon]

Beginner-friendly I don't know, but most user-friendly certainly. I escaped Debian because it didn't let me do what I wanted.
_________________
Life is a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think.

[redfish]

The biggest user unfriendliness in Debian is the complexity of its package recipes. Writing/debugging the recipe is in many cases more difficult than the software being packaged. That's what forced me into Arch, because I write a lot of packages for random software, because I refuse to install anything into my system without it being in a package (because that's how you lose track of what versions are even installed, and how cruft accumulates in your system, causes wild breakage, and misleads people into the reinstall the system every 6 months mentality).

An Arch PKGBUILD is a simple shell script which you can write and debug without even reading the docs, just by example and intuitive meaning of everything. Gentoo ebuilds are certainly heavier but for good reasons, and they are still easy to follow shell scripts, unlike Debian's rules. Also, the convention that upstream needs to carry a debian/ folder is pure hubris. Gentoo is very friendly to people who write packages and to upstreams, too.

[figueroa]

[ziad]

[figueroa]

[Juippisi]

If you have the patience to learn and read a bit before pressing enter, then Gentoo will be fine.

With many other distros you can get quite far by just clicking next next next without thinking too much, but not with Gentoo. However the documentation is there, and it's good.

[NeddySeagoon]

ziad,

Welcome.

Gentoo is not really a distro. Its a toolkit you use to design and install your own distro. Every Gentoo install is different.
There are over 2^20 ways to build LibreOffice in Gentoo binary distro pick one and everyone gets it.
Thats just a single package.

If you really wanted to, you could do

[asturm]

Gentoo is beginner friendly to the right beginner.

[alamahant]

[Zucca]

[ziad]

[xahodo]

Gentoo has served me well all these years, not one headache because of it.

It has always done exactly what I tell it to.

Yesyes, there were the occasional packages that consume too much memory (qtwebengine , spidermonkey ) and make my computer crash (out of memory, only got 8GB RAM and no swap (kde seems to love the fact that it can swap)), until I put them on a diet regarding threads.

[psycho]

[WvR]

I have been using Gentoo Linux for more than 15 years on various types of hardware, ranging from simple laptop PCs to high-performance workstations.

Gentoo is not user-friendly and even with 15 years of experience I still run into problems every once in a while.

In my experience laptops are always a nuisance. In fact, for my most recent laptop I have switched to Ubuntu because I really did not want to spend the time to get all the hardware to work.

If you judge the "quality" of a linux distribution by the number of folders in the user home folder, then I would say that that is a very superficial judgment. It is similar to saying that car A is better than car B because it has less cup holders.

To learn about computer operating systems, the best book is:

Operating Systems, Design and Implementation, 3rd Edition by Andrew Tanenbaum (Author), Albert Woodhull (Author)

[psycho]

Yes, Ubuntu's undoubtedly more beginner-friendly in some of those areas, although hardware is more of a kernel issue than a distro issue. Building a custom kernel is no easier on Ubuntu or any other distro...in fact I often feel like it's harder to do things the right way ("the Debian way") with all the kernel and header packages as it's more complex: Gentoo keeps kernel building simple. Plus if we're happy to apt-get install a gigantic generic kernel on some other distro, it's no harder to emerge gentoo-kernel-bin here and enjoy roughly the same instant effortless hardware support.

As for the out-of-kernel stuff like custom laptop button configurations and whatnot, I've never found a distro (and that includes Ubuntu and Mint and so on) that nails all that stuff out-of-the-box: I usually get a bunch of nice surprises (great, the webcam that took me ten hours to configure a couple of years ago just works now...cool, two-finger tapping the touchpad is a right-click already...) and then a bunch of disappointments (oh great, none of this distro's official kernel packages are recent enough to support my wifi adapter...and oh great, no kernel events from any of these buttons down the side of the laptop at all...), and wind up spending roughly as much time puzzling over laptop-specific modules and hacks as I spend doing the same kind of stuff on Gentoo.

I meant what I said about friendships and occasional MMA-style beat-downs: plenty of fighters do indeed count among their friends people who've smashed their faces...it's all about context. Gentoo is actually quite beginner-friendly to tinkering control freaks like myself because our need to optimise and refine everything is going to land us in the same whoops-maybe-all-those-fonts-weren't-superfluous-junk-after-all situations on other distros too, only here we have a community of been-there-done-that experts to help us out. Ubuntu is unquestionably more beginner-friendly to the beginners who just want to surf the net and write their emails with minimal effort; but Gentoo is arguably more beginner-friendly to beginners who want to hack the heck out of their systems, as its focus on education and choice can be more supportive towards them. I've participated in lots of different Linux forums and Gentoo's have always been my favourite, by far.

Too often it's a bunch of childishly angry experts or a bunch of friendly enthusiastic folk with no expertise. Gentoo offers beginners encouragement and expertise, so I'd say it's one of the most beginner-friendly distros for a particular kind of beginner.

[pa4wdh]