I mean, is it really worth it to compile every single program that I install? Wouldn’t that be a waste of time? I am inclined to try it out but on the other hand idk
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If you want to REALLY get comfortable with how linux works under the hood, then Gentoo is an awesome learning tool. The amount of choices and customization options is ridiculous, from choosing which features you want to enable(compile) for an app, to choosing between bootloaders, init systems, and so on.
I haven’t used Gentoo in quite a while, but I wouldn’t be a professional Sysadmin today if it weren’t for Gentoo.
I would agree with this. I used Gentoo for a while before moving to Ubuntu.
Gentoo helps you learn and leads (forces) you down the path of getting under the hood to tweak your Linux experience.
I wouldn’t recommend it if you need to build systems quickly for production. I’m sure there are hacks to do it more quickly.
I’m really glad I used it before Ubuntu. I feel like a have a much firmer grasp of the concepts of Linux because of my experience with it.
No. It’s a lifestyle.
In the Intel core 2 era I played with doing this and trying to have the kernel and software all optimized and compiled for the specific hardware of the specific computer I was using and the performance gains if any were negligible.
I’d lean towards no.
I am running gentoo on 4 different systems currently.
Setup can be a bit of a hustle, especially on exotic hardware (one of my devices is a Pine64 Quartz64) but once it’s running maintenance isn’t that big of a deal, an emerge —sync && emerge -avdu @world per week generally is all the maintenance I do.
Also if you want to learn about linux there is probably no better way except LFS which will not leave you with a system you can easily use in day to day work.
I say give it a shot if you have the time and are willing to learn and troubleshoot!
