Is gentoo a meme or should I actually consider getting it?

I'm currently running manjaro (i3-gaps) and its performing really well. My only qualm with it is that there's a considerable amount of bloat (god forbid you try downloading gnome with this). My home partition is 150G and my root partition is 60G so I doubt I'll actually run out of disk space anytime soon, but I like keeping the number of packages I have to a minimum (and pacman doesnt clean very well either), I also do a full system backup every month (cron + rsync + tar) so my backup drive might get a little stuffed too?

I love AUR (hence why I use manjaro), and I also tried arch a few days ago but that went horribly. Considering gentoo takes multiple pages of documentation to sift through let alone one arch wiki page, I'm assuming I'll most likely mess this up. Anyway Guix also looks really appealing, and pacman/most aur helpers kind of suck. For those of you who run Linux or another unix based machine, what do you use and why?

Reply 1

YUSZ1

I think Gentoo is mostly a meme, but Funtoo is a modified version of Gentoo made by Gentoo's creator which simplifies things like USE flags that Gentoo uses, for example a tool in Funtoo called epro is used to manage USE flags in batch, while using arguments to tailor the USE flags (in batch) to your system; In Gentoo you would have to fill up a file called /etc/make.conf with a bunch of USE flags, which you would have to research each and every one of; But in Funtoo epro is really handy and basically does the work of setting USE flags for you. I think Funtoo is an improvement over Gentoo tbh, but I don't use either.

To this day I haven't been able to install Gentoo or Funtoo since on Funtoo Nvidia drivers must be messed up or smthin because the system just hangs at boot, and Gentoo took too much time to install and the install guide wasn't concise enough/ I was too lazy to install it that day (compilation of everything is quite annoying even though it may "improve" the packages speed through USE flags, it just took too much time for me tbh). I might try and install Funtoo again some day, it's just the fact that it takes a lot of time to install (depends on how fast your system can compile things, on my system compiling the default Funtoo kernel would take like 8 hours, and I don't want to wait that long just to install an OS).

Right now I use Arch linux (it's way faster to install than both Gentoo and Funtoo) and the AUR is really nice, I use the window manager XMonad which is what I prefer, but everyone likes different window managers (it just depends on what you want I guess). I try to configure XMonad in a way in which it doesn't get bloated with keybinds (since I can't remember all of them).

I think you should try Arch before you try Gentoo or Funtoo, since Arch gives a decent "introduction" into a barebones setup with a few hundred packages (I think?) installed by default, and it is a binary-based distro (rather than Gentoo and it's modified versions being source-based distros, this means you have to compile packages basically), you can build up the system like what Gentoo/Funtoo let's you do (Arch doesn't come with the USE flags thing though).

I am glad to see a fellow tiling WM user, they really do improve productivity tbh.

(edited 2 years ago)

Reply 2

vapordave

Debate & Current Affairs Helper

Original post by YUSZ1

I think Gentoo is mostly a meme, but Funtoo is a version of Gentoo made by Gentoo's creator which simplifies things like USE flags that Gentoo uses, for example a tool in Funtoo called epro is used to manage USE flags in batch, while using arguments to tailor the USE flags (in batch) to your system; In Gentoo you would have to fill up a file called /etc/make.conf with a bunch of USE flags, which you would have to research each and every one of; But in Funtoo epro is really handy and basically does the work of setting USE flags for you. I think Funtoo is an improvement over Gentoo tbh, but I don't use either.

To this day I haven't been able to install Gentoo or Funtoo since on Funtoo Nvidia drivers must be messed up or smthin because the system just hangs at boot, and Gentoo took too much time to install and the install guide wasn't concise enough (I would have to jump around pages to find how to do a specific thing I want done now and not 2 hours later).

Right now I use Arch linux (it's way faster to install than both Gentoo and Funtoo) and the AUR is really nice, I use the window manager XMonad which is what I prefer, but everyone likes different window managers (it just depends on what you want I guess). I try to configure XMonad in a way in which it doesn't get bloated with keybinds (since I can't remember all of them).

Please try not to bump old threads but I'm really glad you bumped this one :biggrin:

I've been using Arch Linux/i3-gaps for a while, and I'm considering switching to Xmonad. Do you recommend it?

Reply 3

YUSZ1

Original post by Vapordave

Please try not to bump old threads but I'm really glad you bumped this one :biggrin:

I've been using Arch Linux/i3-gaps for a while, and I'm considering switching to Xmonad. Do you recommend it?

Yes I really do, at first since it's configured in Haskell it seems daunting (but you only need to know a very small amount of Haskell), but I guarantee you it pays off. It is good to learn a tiny bit of Haskell though before you use XMonad (I recommend these links to get started):
http://learnyouahaskell.com/ <- great introduction into Haskell
I recommend these videos from a youtube channel called Distrotube, he explains the landscape of XMonad really well and I used this channel to give me a bit of motivation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3noK4GTmyMw
Configure XMobar (XMonads bar, like i3's bar):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCzuMHU3Qtw
Here he explains everything in his own personal configuration of XMonad and XMobar (bit overwhelming of a video to watch when your just starting to use XMonad, but later on this video is helpful):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPQ9mn9Nkpc

XMobar's website:
https://xmobar.org/

XMonad's website:
https://xmonad.org/

XMonad-contrib (these are the "addons" of XMonad, everyone uses these heavily, for configuring keybinds and a lot of other things):
https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib

Baseline config for XMonad and XMobar:
https://wiki.haskell.org/Xmonad/Config_archive/John_Goerzen's_Configuration

Config to use XMonad in XFCE Desktop Environment:
https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_XFCE

I wish you good luck, XMonad is a great journey and learning experience!

Is gentoo a meme or should I actually consider getting it?

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