I successfully installed Gentoo for the first time today!

Everyone should do this at least once
- Agreed. It's such a great learning process. I ultimately gave up on Gentoo but learned a lot by using it for about 2 years way back in around 2005.
  Linux From Scratch brings a huge leap in understanding too.
  
  I found Gentoo more helpful than LFS because with LFS you compile about 80 packages from source one at a time but you don't learn too much about the packages.
  LFS gave me much more awareness of what packages actually come with a Linux install but Gentoo taught me more about configuring and booting a Linux system.
  Although I'd definitely recommend both to anyone wanting to learn. I'd do Gentoo first then LFS.
  Edit: LFS is also a masterclass in cross compiling so if that's something you're curious about LFS is the way to go.
  
  Back in like 2011 I was living out of state for college. Had decided to drop out at the time so had limitless free time for a bit. I definitely used that time to compile my own kernel and setup gentoo lol. I haven’t played with gentoo since but it was fun and helped my appreciation for Linux.
  
  Linux from Scratch is also an immensely powerful tool for deployment of secure software. Rebuilding the entire infrastructure between releases ensures threat actors can’t stay resident for long if the compromise production systems.
  
  I installed LFS that on my Dell Latitude 13 (Core 2 Duo SU7300) in a 3 month on and off operation, with packages compiling (and failing) overnight all the time.
- I had considered trying it at one point. Unfortunately one specific user on discord kept telling me to install it to the point of dming me "gentoo" almost every day, at which point I blocked them and vowed never to install gentoo
  
  Fuck that guy. Don't let him influence you. Install gentoo or don't, for your own reasons.
  
  It is good fun if you're really into Linux, I practically jumped out my seat when I crossed my fingers, rebooted and GRUB came up with Gentoo listed.
- Arch teaches you the most important stuff without wasting too much on time... Not a Gentoo fan
  
  I use Arch on my host machine, the stuff I learnt when doing Gentoo today was wayyy deeper than Arch has ever gotten near. I agree that Arch teaches what most people should know, but Gentoo fully teaches what most people should have at least a small understanding of.

My first Gentoo install took like a week to get X running. It was my first foray into Linux (Ok, I briefly tried mkLinux).
I learnt the hard way, but I learnt. And I'm still on that same path: Gentoo. Why I don't bother switching? Because I can customize Gentoo to whatever I like, so instead of doing distro hop I just reconfigure things.
- Because I can customize Gentoo to whatever I like
  Can you customise it to support AAA videogames?
  
  Yeah. Install steam.
  
  Why not?
  I don't have much experience on those games. I've bought around ten games from gog. And I specifically selected those which provided Linux native binaries. But there are AAA gamers among Gentoo users.
  
  Not everyone is a gamer.

Speaking from personal experience, see you on your old distro in a couple of days!
- I'm putting it on my hardware as we speak, we'll see :D
  
  Compiling... Compiling... Compiling...

How much maintenance does Gentoo need once installed? I don't mind a complicated install but it's the constant tinkering I can't deal with.
- If you've done arch, it's like long arch
  
  Gentoo probably doesn't have all packages. One of the reasons I love Arch is because it almost always has any package in the AUR. It's a lot more work to try and get something installed on Ubuntu related distros. They try to keep up by using snaps and stuff but it's still no comparison. Arch has everything.
  Still it's gets a bit boring now since I know it so well, so want to try Gentoo at some point also.
  
  I've done Arch a couple of times but don't care to ever do it again to be honest. Maybe I'll try Gentoo one day.
- It's pretty maintenance free.
  The following will make the experience a bit more seamless:
  use stable packages
  use sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel or syskernel/gentoo-kernel-bin
  use sys-boot/grub or better yet sys-boot/refind which auto-recognizes the latest kernel in your boot directory
  I don’t mind a complicated install
  After you have "installed" Gentoo there will be quite lot of installing of different programs to build your own customized distro. However if you yse systemd you'd get quite a lot in one strike, since systemd contains a whole lot of the central core components, like system logger (journald). The other route is to use OpenRC and with it sysvinit or openrc-init and choose the rest of the components.
  Asking your question (the one I'm replying to) at the Gentoo forums may give you better answers and tips how to build maintenance free setup.
- Afaik, albeit this system is only like 6 hours old, just an updating everything should be enough. Again though, I've still never ran Gentoo semi-permanently nor on bare metal so I can't really help you out there.
- Not much. Updates take a bit longer because you're compiling, although Gentoo now has an official binary package host if you want to skip that step - you'll only compile things that you've changed compile-time features to the extent that they don't match the binhost now!
  You don't need to constantly tinker to keep the system running, at least, news is good for major changes, and we have a good 'config file changed' system.
  
  Gentoo now has an official binary package host
  With some limitations:
  The binhost packages have the USE flags set as in an unmodified 17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd profile (with the exception of USE=bindist). The packages can be used on all amd64 profiles that differ from desktop/plasma/systemd only by USE flag settings. This includes 17.1, 17.1/desktop/*, 17.1/no-multilib, 17.1/systemd, but not anything containing selinux, hardened, developer, musl, or a different profile version such as 17.0.
- @Carter @H2207 You don’t really have to tinker with any distro. Once you set it up just let it be with a schedule of updates that fits your usecase. If you feel compelled to constantly update and rejigger, that’s you, not the distro. I have a Mankato machine that has been sitting for a couple of years with monthly security updates.
  
  I installed Arch last week and it crashed within hours and then refused to boot due to an fstab issue. I switched to openSUSE and haven't had any issues.

Congrats! I bet you learned a lot along the way…

One of us!
You can join our tiny community at !gentoo@lemm.ee
I run it as my main gaming OS, no joke.
- You can join our tiny community at !gentoo@lemm.ee
  Oh, nice!
- I run it as my main gaming OS, no joke
  pics or I'll call that bullshit
  
  Do we have some kind of a remindme bot here? I'm away from home for another week and this is my desktop.
  
  Running Kingdom Come: Deliverance while doing a world update in Portage. Have at it!
  Now why is there an EA launcher icon in the taskbar? Well, I was going to take a screenshot of Mass Effect LE, but EA launcher decided not to cooperate with me, probably a Proton update or something (KC:D was also having a brand new crash till I switched over to Experimental). I was too lazy to look up the process ID and kill it because I'm going to reboot when I update my kernel anyway.
  
  There is at least a few of us. My gaming desktop, personal laptop, and work laptop are all running Gentoo!

I remember printing out the Gentoo installation manual in the compsci lab way back in 2004. It was my first Linux distro and have fond memories of tinkering around on it. I remember leaving it a few years later for a cool new distro that was on the rise called Ubuntu. I still think portage is one of the better approaches to package management though.

I installed Gentoo once. ever. I use Ubuntu now.
This was in the mid 2000's and I went so far as to compile the kernel myself and build out all the packages. I was so exhausted at the end of it all, that I'm pretty sure I put away that system and never looked back. It's quite the achievement, but I don't wish to repeat that experience.

Congrats!
Once you get it set just so, remember it’s ok to … leave it!
- Ha
  Hahahaha
  Hahahhahahhahahahhaha!
  Mwha Ha Haaaa!
  
  This is the way
  System boots, runs flawlessly.
  Hmm
  # emerge -deep world

I remember how rewarding and satisfying it was when I finally installed Gentoo for the first time
- Same. Gentoo taught me so much. Wouldn't run it today, though. Ain't got time for that.

I did it from stage 1 once.. wasn't a fast computer either. You have to compile the tools to compile the tools. Then compile the base packages, then everything else..
Alas you can't do that any more. Pity as it was fun.
- This has kept me from switching back to gentoo a few times now.

My first Gentoo install took a weekend and about a week later I had a desktop. KDE took me like 2 days to compile. p3 800mhz Toshiba with maybe 256MB RAM I forget actually...version was 1.2 alpha I wrote 1.too on the CD

I have installed it maybe 5 times now manually. These days I do a script install then mod whatever I need to afterwards. This time I'm experimenting with binaries by converting the whole system to a bin system. It's a good bit quicker and a little easier to manage. The few things I need to configure get done so through source, but most things are fine as a bin package.

Worth celebrating! Time to celebrate by breaking everything 😹
- While one can break Gentoo, in most cases it is also fixable.
  
  In every case 😹

Mazel tov!

- Might as well run Arch at that point. Spending an hour or two pressing y and n teach you so much.
  
  Arch still doesn't have the same flexibility as Gentoo. Also Gentoo even offers sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin for precompiled kernel. Personally I use sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel (which autocompiles and installs) and have custom config snippets at /etc/kernel/config.d/.
  
  Agree. Poking around the config menu with all those options definitely showed me just what the kernel actually does and supports, it was oddly cool being able to turn on/off WiFi or Bluetooth for example, or GPU drivers.
- Genkernel kinda sucks TBH. I dug into the code recently and it has some hardcoded good assumptions. Just use the distro kernel in 2023 though!

Hehe... I installed Gentoo last year and I was thrown in the deepest of deep ends after having to set up a custom initramfs for my LUKS setup... took about a week to get it running...
- I created a bash script which creates a custom initramfs for me every time kernel is updated. 😜 I know, I reinvented the wheel... kinda. My script actually only takes a list of files, directories, modules, firmware files and packs them into a cpio archive. The actual init scripts inside initramfs (for example) are not provided, but left for the user to write or copy from somewhere.

Well done! Not too hard?
- No it wasn't bad actually with the hand-holding a long the way, I mainly followed the handbook but if I didn't understand anything then I went back to the MO video to see what he did. Compiling from source is definitely what took the longest but that's to be expected with Gentoo. The overall install process felt like a bit more involved Arch install.

What is the value proposition of Gentoo over, say, something like NixOS?
- Actual USE flags I guess? If you ultimately want these is a different question though
  
  Interesting, looked at the Gentoo docs to understand USE flags. Nix has similar capabilities, where some packages expose configuration options that apply to the build, but it's not a overtly named feature consistently applies across all packages. It seems that something like USE flags could be implemented rather easily by Nix but was either deemed not necessary or was an oversight. You can still change the build for any package but it might involve introspecting the package definition to figure out what to change so not meant as a first class mechanism like USE flags.
  Edit: found this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/12877
  
  USE flags and profiles.
  I have one old laptop where I decided to test some more obscure Gentoo setups. I chose musl as libc and took llvm toolchain to compile stuff. (All experimental)

I did it once on the first intel MacBook. It compiled for like 14 hours.

Dont want to offend, but this is the most environmentally harmful OS on this planet probably. Except maybe BitcoinOS or something XD
- How exactly? On idle Gentoo uses almost no resouces comapred to Windows 11 for example. If you're on about needing to compile every package, then think how often is someone actually installing a new package and for how long is the processor working to do that? Also on a binary distro, then large servers are used to compile every last package, no matter how big or small, in that distro's repos, then more machines are used to provide those binaries to the users.
  The whole pipeline for Gentoo is much simpler, the end user's system is a lot simpler and uses far less resources.
  
  They are referring to the fact that Gentoo compiles everything from source rather than shipping binaries. This creates a lot of duplicated work between every user. But it's not just for nothing. You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries and they are optimized for your system. It is a trade off.
- Might as well call linux the most polluting OS. It props up old inefficient systems with high TPW and takes longer to complete tasks. Whereas microsoft and apple makes sure their users are on the latest efficient hw. Maybe a bit offset by the ewaste but who cares, Apple and MS are out savingy the earth.
  
  What?
  
  Oh I really hope this is satire.

It's on my bucket list to do this also one day. It's fun to mess around.