Everything just feels way more complicated than it needs to be.
I tried installing Openshot (a video editor) but I couldn’t figure out how to fix the error it spits out when I try to emerge it.
I will now try out Arch and hope I don’t need a master’s degree to install packages.
Edit: Gentoo isn’t the first distro I’ve tried, I’ve been daily driving Debian for more than a year and just wanted to try it out since I heard good things about it. And also I didn’t really need to use Openshot, I just wanted some video editor and arbitrarily chose to install that one.
Also I guess I will just stick with Debian since apparently Arch is also complicated.
Arch isn’t any easier than Gentoo. If you’re newer to Linux and looking for something that ‘just works’ I’d stick with something Debian based like Ubuntu, Elementary, Mint, or PopOS
akhtchually arch is a little easier than gentoo. gentoo is fully source-based, while arch is binary first. gentoo has use flags, while arch comes preoccupied with flags.
albeit both distros cater to a little more experienced users, there’s that. i also think a more user-friendly distro would be a better start. at least the ones where you can get a working environment by just using a live installer. mint IS a good alternative.
No way! 😱
I’ll take a look at these distros, though I’m not really too much of a beginner anymore.
I actually come from Debian, but I hopped distros in hopes of finding an even better distro.
Gotcha! Enjoy your hopping then - just didn’t want someone to try out Linux for the first time on hard mode and give up
I mean… It doesn’t have to be a competition, does it?
Some people just want a stable system to work on. I kind of want to leave Ubuntu, I like mint and popos, but. They don’t always work out of the box like Ubuntu does for me. So I just change the dm to emulate other distros and it feels good enough.
Am I doing it wrong?
I installed Gentoo back when I was just starting out with Linux (I got the release from the DVD on the front of a magazine, if you want an idea of how long ago this was!). I learned a tonne about Linux that has stuck with me to this day, but then promptly wiped the drive and installed something that I actually wanted to use day-to-day hahaha.
So yeah, it happens!
Yep that’s Gentoo for ya.
In my experience, Gentoo is in many ways easier than Arch. Portage is a much better package manager, and getting something to break (even if using unstable) is really hard. Never heard of OpenShot, but I would take a look if there are some bugs related to it that are relevant. https://bugs.gentoo.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=media-video%2Fopenshot
In my experience, whilst Arch is also an excellent distro it is much easier to mess something up, or for pacman to mess something.
As an every-day Gentoo user, there is little reason to use Gentoo unless you have specific, niche configuration requirements. For instance, if you need to use a very specific version of a piece of software with very specific build-time parameters.
Where Gentoo shines is the ability to combine some old packages with some bleeding edge ones. If I, for some reason, want to run PostgreSQL 10 (released 2017) alongside Node.js 20 (released 2023), it is a thing I can do. This is not possible on most other distros - at least, not without side-stepping the package manager and compiling a bunch of things yourself.
I’ve used Gentoo several times over the years, and what ultimately made me switch back was Docker’s reliance on iptables. I was using Fedora at the time, which had switched to nftables. (I don’t think this is as much of an issue now, but it was a few years back).
