20 Years of Gentoo

[Beetle B.]

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

Edit: Updated link
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Beetle B.

Please update the table of equivalents.
A Firefox guide.

[mobiusproject]

The first distro that I also really stuck with was gentoo. I started on a P3 550 Mhz machine with 512 MB of ram. I wanted to understand what was going on behind the scenes. I really wanted to know how it all `worked`. Later, when employed, I occasionally needed different compilers at different times to build for different machines which gentoo always allowed me but other distros made incredibly difficult. It has been my main operating system ever since. I am happy to see the other people who have been around as long as I have. Wonderful post.

[Beetle B.]

Thanks. Should have written more about the Forums - I've been inactive here for probably over a decade. Posting once in a while for help. Glad to see my password still worked!

Just noticed the plot on the page wasn't showing up. Fixed it.
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Beetle B.

Please update the table of equivalents.
A Firefox guide.

[NichtDerHans]

Congratulation!

[pietinger]

Beetle B.

a klick on your both links in your signature gives me a 404 Not found ... only for your information.

[NeddySeagoon]

Beetle B,

Congratultions!

I'm getting close to 20 years too. If you want a trip down memory lane there is Historical Gentoo
If you have any of the missing files and would care to share, please PM.

What stands out to me is that portage is more complete than it was in 2003. Some of helper scripts are only required in special circumstances.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[stefan11111]

Congratulations, your article was a good read!

[Spanik]

Read your blog and I see a lot of parallels to how I got to Gentoo and why. And yes, it is the handbook and forums that are its strongest point. My real motivation to go linux was the way windows handles hard disk and partition naming (it still has issues with it). Linux with its mounting whatever, wherever you want it so it is efficient for the way you work is just bliss. And then 64-bit came. I was already an NT user but having your applications also in 64-bit was just great. Okay, in the beginning with mixed 32/64-bit it was sometimes not that easy.

I looked in my iso directory on the pc and the oldest Gentoo install that sits on it is "install-x86-minimal-2006.0.iso". This fits as I moved to Gentoo while I worked at a company I left end of 2006. There might be a few older ones around on cdroms.

I tend to do a complete re-install when I do major changes to the pc. Not when just adding a drive or so but I do a complete re-install when I change the MB or OS disk. Only got once into serious trouble when updating my system after more than a year. That took a while and a lot of support from the forum.

EDIT: Yikes, I just saw I joined the forums in 2003 so I guess I started using it then. Also almost 20 years!
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Expert in non-working solutions

[Beetle B.]

[Spanik]

[szatox]

[Chiitoo]

[NeddySeagoon]

We had a 10 Year Gentoo Census earlier this year.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[Zucca]

My 20th anniversary is quite close too. I don't have emerge.log from the early days (In fact, with multiple installs, I just tend to discard lot of stuff when new hardware comes to replace older).
I started between 2004 and 2005.
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..: Zucca :..

[pandoraxero]

[maalth]

[leifbk]

My first Gentoo installation was in summer 2003, on a Pentium II 266 MHz laptop with 64 MB RAM. The installation, including KDE desktop, took about 2 weeks. Before that, I had also tested Mandrake and Debian, but left them for the same reasons as you. Finding Gentoo felt like coming home.

Pretty soon, I converted my main computer from Windows 2000 to Gentoo, and never looked back.

I've never had any serious crashes such as the udev issue you mention, but then I update almost daily. But I can attest to the need for a rescue CD, and a way to read web pages if your Gentoo box goes down.
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Grumpy old man

[wklam]

BeetleB,

Thank you so much for this thoughtful and wonderful piece! It resonates with me.

As a matter of fact, I have a similar journey. I signed up for this Reddit account today just to post this. [Edit, that post was auto-removed. So I am posting here on Gentoo Forum]

Couple things that I want to mention:

• I first started using Gentoo in ~2005 [Edit, my gentoo forum profile showed that I joined in 2005, but my emerge.log shows 2009] with my new build at the time (Phenom II 940). I am still rocking the same build (motherboard, cpu and ram anyway). But has since upgraded HDD (to SSD) and GPU (because of bulging capacitors causing instability), noisy cooling fans, power supplies (2 times), etc.
  
  
• The rolling nature of Gentoo keeps me up to date. That's the very reason I am still using this system. I am planning on a new build (because hardware price has fallen quite a bit). Otherwise, I would still be using this same PC, maybe with a few more SSD upgrades.
  
  
• Before that, I too, was using Mandrake.
  
  
• As you mentioned in the article, the very well documentation of Gentoo brought me here. More specifically, it was RAID5 + LVM2 + Reiser4 + LUKS Wiki. I am still using the very same setup.
  
  
• I appreciate the USE flags. The choice.
  
  
• You mentioned painful points of Gentoo. One of which is dependency hell. I fully agree with you. However, after overcoming one after one dependency, (with the help of friendly members of forums.gentoo.org), it brought me sense of satisfaction! Each dependency I went through, I get attached to my hard-earned "working Gentoo" even more.
  
  
• Another thing is the community of 3rd party ebuilds in gpo.zugaina.org. And numerous others who share their ebuilds in github / gitlab. (pf4public, guru, ROKO__ stefantalpalaru, among others)
  
  
• What makes Gentoo viable for me is: the contributions of all gentoo developers and users. I do not feel "abandoned" which keeps me from moving to other distro.
  
  
• You mentioned distrowatch ranking. I personally don't pay too much attention to that anymore (I used to). I was thinking gentoo users don't go to distrowatch and search for gentoo everyday.
  
  
• I do have some other boxes running Ubuntu / Debian. Not by choice. E.g. My Ubiquiti Edgerouter is using Debian stretch. My Raspberry pi4 was running Raspberry Pi OS. That being said, I was trying to fetch a package for my Ubiquiti edgerouter and found that Stretch is not being supported anymore. I had to change the Debian repository to archive.debian.org, etc. Did I say "being abandoned"? This is what makes Gentoo special, in my heart.
  
  
• I have kids. Their OS of choice is Mac OS. They hate Windows (also their locked-down and under-powered school chromebooks) to their guts. I did teach them MacPorts. They are not very much into command line stuff. I hope one day, they will also appreciate Gentoo, or Linux in general. Maybe when I die and they inherit my ancient Phenom II 940, they will have no choice (j/k).
  
  
• Last but not least, I sincerely thank all Gentoo developers / contributers, and forum members who helped other menbers. After all, this is what keeps me using gentoo. Without all of you, I would have been switched to some other distro.
  

Again, Thank you for your article. It brought back a lot of good memories (and dependency hell) all these years.

It's hard to predict the future (I am terribly bad at this). I hope 20, 30, 50 years down the road, the neofetch emblem of Gentoo will still be there.

-William

[sdauth]

For me, it will be soon the 5 year mark (August). I was always switching between debian & arch before, so that says a lot, best distro All my hardware run Gentoo now, even the slowest ones (14 years old Atom potato )