this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Does anyone actually use Gentoo? Why? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by ayyo@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Just wanna preface, I'm not trying to like attack Gentoo or anyone that uses it, I just wanna understand lol

I'm like an intermediate Linux user I'm definitely not an expert, and Gentoo is something I'm still quite confused about. To me it just seems unnecessary, like the real version of people making Arch just seem incredibly complicated. Does anyone actually use it as a daily driver? Why? Is it just for the love of the game? Is there some specific use case I've not heard or thought of?

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[–] Obin@feddit.org 22 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've been using Gentoo since 2008 as my main distro. Some Arch and Ubuntu on the side. Gentoo for me sits right in the middle of Arch's pragmatism and the customizability of something like NixOS/Guix.

Portage on its own is a game changer. And forget about the compiling and ricing, that's not the main benefit, which are:

  • USE-flags to manage dependencies and only install what you want with the feature set you want
  • downgrading/masking packages at will with dependencies still intact (on other distros this might work for a time, but things will silently or colossally break unexpectedly)
  • fully flexible choice between stable and testing versions
  • managing config updates via dispatch-conf and getting notified about pending config updates after each operation
  • getting news of breaking changes or migrations directly through the package manager via eselect news
  • applying custom patches to package automatically by dropping them in a config folder
  • using portage bashrc to modify packages on the fly, with hooks for each step of build and installation
  • Writing ebuilds and deploying them in an overlay is the most straight forward and easiest way to do custom packages in Linux
  • setting up custom portage profiles to share a branching tree of configuration between systems

I also think the philosophy of the devs and maintainers is entirely different than on Arch. Take the difference of the above mentioned news via the package manager to Arch's philosophy of "you'll notice the breaking changes by the system breaking" maximum simplicity at the cost of many more sharp edges for the user. I can't count how many times I had to revisit the /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist, manually reset the keyring, clean up optional dependencies by hand, manually reinstall the AUR-helper etc. While on portage, when it says you're good, you're good. And anything you need to do in addition, it will tell you.

That said, while the system is very maintainable and pragmatically customizable, and with the official binhost, compile-times aren't a big issue anymore, the learning curve certainly is very steep. More than any other distro, Gentoo is what you use when you want to get your hands dirty AND reap the reward in a system that runs like a well oiled machine.