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I finally managed to install Gentoo on my laptop.

My experience with it was very good. The hand book is enough but I got an error which the handbook didn't mention so I looked online and asked in their Discord. Everyone was fast, friendly and very helpful. If I compare NixOS to Gentoo, NixOS is rather the opposite. Heavily lacking documentation, community is rather slow and from what I've seen on reddit, there is a drama going on lol.

Time wise:
It should have taken me 2 days. But it took me 2+ weeks instead (I also got lazy at one point and procrastinated). And today when I reinstalled Gentoo (my previous Gentoo install didn't boot) and knew what I was doing, I did it in 3 hours.

Before that I tried out NixOS and I liked it but it had its flaws.
https://devrant.com/rants/10817333/...

Now I will experiment with Hyprland and i3.
I will also create an install script out of all of it at one point.

I'm really impressed by the very low RAM usage btw. Holy shit!

A tip for new comers: Begin with the dist-kernels. Later on you can still customize new kernels and build them from source. Otherwise you'll face issues.

Comments
  • 4
    Congrats! I confess, I've never had the patience to bother with Gentoo, but that's pretty cool. NixOS broke my tiny little brain when I messed with that, but I definitely get the appeal of something like it. Maybe someone will make a dumbass friendly spin off of it for people like me one day.
  • 2
    @nosoup4u thanks and same until I just went for it haha
  • 4
    I see you went hardcore path, gentoo is still one of the pro distributions.

    I install fedora desktop nowadays and then remove the bloatware.

    I do it so I can use the power saving settings, install nvidia drivers and manipulate graphic card maximum power usage.

    I found fedora the only distribution that can survive both nvidia drivers and kernel update that can recover from invalid configuration by just disabling graphic driver.
  • 2
    @nosoup4u speaking of NixOS. I can clean up my config file and upload it to GitHub if you're interested. I can guide you through what everything is for, as well. No problem.

    NixOS has a really steep learning curve, unfortunately. At one point you realize that the docs are shit and that you have to read through thousands of repositories, instead.
  • 2
    I appreciate that, but I think I'll just stick to my comfort zone of Debian or Ubuntu for work/servers, and Void and Arch for my personal use and development. Unfortunately part of it is just not wanting to necessarily dive into the brand new and unknown if I can avoid it. I'm way too busy.
  • 2
    @vane I see. That's quite interesting. Other than that what else makes you choose Fedora instead of something like Gentoo?
  • 2
    @nosoup4u that's fair. If I didn't have time and was busy, I would also not do it. Arch Linux is also a very good distro
  • 2
    @-ANGRY-STUDENT-

    It's just upstream redhat so if you ever worked with Redhat enterprise linux or centos and you liked it you feel like at home.

    You have package groups, they have dnf package manager where you can install "development tools".

    Virtualization in installed out of the box(es).

    SMB /APFS file sharing is out of the box

    Install UI is just couple of clicks.

    Simplicity of ui, dark mode.

    Bottles (wine wrapper) just works so you can basically play all windows games or run windows programs.

    All enterprise products support it because they support redhat distro.

    Fedora releases usually once per year but there is no official release plan and after they release they support old version only for 6 months but you might want to wait those 6 months because I bet it's window for enterprise to package for new fedora.

    Well I liked redhat since I used it at work and after centos died I'm using fedora, not latest one but I update just before end of life so nothing breaks.
  • 2
    @vane I used to use Centos in vps environments. Didn't know that it died. Damn.

    All in all this sounds more like a better version of NixOS (things are easily available out of the box and installing UI stuff) but in a more complete, more supported and non declarative way.
  • 2
    Nice shot of a screen. I do it that way too, it disappoints people.

    I use xubuntu, an OS must just work for me, not me for the OS.

    Tried i3, wanted to be part of hype, but it's not for me. Xfce till I die
  • 2
    @-ANGRY-STUDENT- They killed Centos after IBM acquired Redhat but some people say it was dying for a long time.
  • 1
    @vane was kinda shocked after your message but just CentOS 7&8 are EOL and CentOS 9 just exists. It's not killed?
  • 1
    @retoor that’s Centos Stream, old Centos LTS that was free alternative of RHEL LTS died

    https://endoflife.date/centos

    the new stream is just repacked fedora that loses all patches after 2 years when RHEL still maintains LTS

    https://endoflife.date/centos-strea...

    corresponding redhat post

    https://redhat.com/en/blog/...
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