What is the update frequency with Gentoo?

[xanrer]

Hello, I'm thinking on migrating to Gentoo after extensive testing. My biggest pain point with Arch was how bleeding edge it was. How is the update cycle with Gentoo? Is it way to fast like Arch or is it like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, which is usually tested rather well. I'm not asking this for just binaries either. I want to know about source repos too.

[rfx]

I only use stable and compile myself and in a long period of time I've only had a problem once after updating Grub. For me it looks very good tested

I'm very curious what the unstable users say about this threat xD

[NeddySeagoon]

Welcome to Gentoo.
The ::gentoo repo is updated every 30 minuets. :)
You are not expected to keep up with that.

Therre are two 'branches'in the repo, stable and testing.
There are also a smattering af 'live' commit by commit packages too.

By default you will have stable, denoted by ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="arch"
If you want sometingthat moves a bit faster, there is testing, denoted by ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~arch"
That requires you to set that. It's also possible to mix and match.

Using 'live' packages can only be done on a package by package basis.

That's just the start, it covers what is available to you.
How often you update your Gentoo is up to you.
The longer you leave it the harder it gets.
Monthly is fine for stable. More often for testing.
If you leave it a year, it's still possible but you will learn things about Gentoo you can learn no other way
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[szatox]

You can update easily on any interval between daily and monthly. After that things get increasingly more difficult, depending on the time passed and your luck. Stories of updates delayed by a year or two pop up now then then as well. Obviously, this path is pretty much for masochists only.

Both, stable and testing branch tend to work. Downloadable stage3 tarballs are stable, you can update to testing at any time with a simple change to accept_keywords.
_________________
Make Computing Fun Again

[xanrer]

[bstaletic]

[wjb]

it all depends how often you run

[eschwartz]

[xanrer]

Thank you for the detailed answer! I love the 30 day policy on stable. And of course I am going to update often. I don't want to keep my system unmaintained.

My use case for Gentoo is kind of complicated. I can of course build sources or use binaries but aside from the core utils + desktop + a few terminal applications I actually want to use Gentoo as a gate to my sandboxes. I will have flatpaks and different distroboxes for different use cases, Arch for programming, Ubuntu for everyday tasks etc. With those I will have the optimal sanboxed and stable experience in my opinion.

The more I learn about Gentoo the more I see it being a perfect fit for my use case. Stable yet up to date core to run my sandboxes on. It will take some learning obviously, but since I learned to use VanillaOS (which is really different from using any other mainstream distro) this year on my other PC I think I'll be able to use Gentoo as well. Not to mention unlike VanillaOS, Gentoo has great documentation.

Plus to all of these I love the community so far. Especially coming from Arch. Arch community was the thing that made me learn to read documentation because they were (although helpful) always really hostile, especially the moderators. In here I only seen support! So thanks to everyone who helped me with all the topics I created so far!

[szatox]

[xanrer]

[NeddySeagoon]

At the risk of pointing out something you have already spotted, Gentoo is the Portage package manager and the ::gentoo ebuild repo.
That's all. Everything else is $UPSTREAM.

As a result, Gentoo is a perfect fit for any use case, servers, desktops, SBCs ...

I'm rambling a bit .. back to my point. The Gentoo community all use the same tools to fit whatever their individual use case is. We all know that all Gentoo installs are different. It's my opinion that using the same tools to achieve different things helps the community be more user friendly.

You will be referred to the friendly manual from time to time. It saves helpers repeating it in a post. However, you will get a pointer to the information you need too. Being lazy, I write wiki pages for recurring problems that I can refer to. :)

One last thing, the old hands here will pitch help just out of your reach.
The aim is to teach you to fish, not feed you. We won't let you drown either.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[pingtoo]

Just want to share an opposite view of frequent update. By no mean I am trying to convince you don't update. I don't do update frequently, I only reinstall from scratch once a few years.

I suggest think what is your daily workflow and reason for update/changes. I will provide a few reason why do and why not.

You do because you wish to stay on edge and to test to help development.
You do because your hardware changed.
You do because you encounter a problem that later version of software solved.
You do because you got new use case that was not part of initial build design.

Why you don't want to make frequent update?

Don't do it because security. security setup should be design upfront with you own thread model. World update may fix something but may break you careful design that bring something in unexpected.
Don't do it because update bring in changes you may not expect and that break your workflow. (think update that need spent time on conflict resolution)
Don't do it because update may break your carefully customisation. for example your key binding, external kernel modules fail due to kernel version update. (think virtualbox)

The drawback of not doing frequent update,

the longer hold back the more difficult for update. So you need to get familiar with Gentoo's tool, Like Neddy said, Gentoo is package manager and ebuild repo. for the package management there are lots of tools to help. see Useful Portage tools wiki page for what I mean.

[pietinger]

[Ralphred]