Back in 2008 when I both my second computer (1st multi-core) I wanted to squeeze all the computation power from it. After a while I was using more than one computer and there was simply no time to compile everything on every machine. So at some point I migrated to Sabayon, a Binary Gentoo distribution. I was playing with SELinux back in 2010 and that was at some point a reason to migrate to Fedora. Since Fedora is mostly designed for servers I became too unfriendly. Unfortunately this was in the time I was finishing both my master degrees so the simplest thing to do was to take a distro for BFUs and that was Ubuntu.
Exams passed and I found myself used to it. New job and other things occupied my mind…
Finally it was the time to go back. It started when I setup my new network infrastructure at home. More machines were involved as servers and at some point I realized that I do not know what is running there. At some point I found out that a configuration I tweaked a week ago is gone… overwritten by update manager >:-( That’s was it!
The good thing about Gentoo was, and still is, that you install/compile/emerge, call it whatever you want, exactingly and only what you want. If the update manager updates a configuration it will not replace your tweaked one. If you customized a file it will tell you that there is an update and you will be able to check the diff, use the new one or keep your customized one just using one tool. The other good thing are USE flags. They keep you awake and wanting to explore what you have, can have and want have in your system. You will never again install a support or library for something you don’t know or want.
Pros:
- Smaller and faster system
- No rotting libraries or programs you never used
- Awareness of what inside
- Learning new stuff by design
- Have to understand your system no matter if you want to 😉
- Be able to write about new, just learned stuff, on your blog between compilations 🙂
- Great documentation, wiki, etc
- Lot of help from a GURU comunity 🙂
- [EDIT]: Compiz does not flash when rotating the desktop cube! Cute! (bug is described e.g. here)
- [EDIT]: No PulseAudio by default
Cons:
- More time spend on installation
- it is not that bad, not a geometric progression, just multiplication by a relatively small constant,
- compensated by faster system – less time spend on waiting to boot, restarts after update, waiting for application to start 🙂
- Have to understand your system no matter if you want to (not meant for Lamers)
So lets go back. System installed in 1 hour (kernel, basic system, xserver, kde4-base, some additional apps i.e. browsers, IDEs, …). Thank not that bad.