So you may have heard of the install gentoo meme, when I looked the guidebook I thought it looked a little complex like with Arch.
Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not? Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.
Isn’t there a Gentoo installer like with Arch? With Arch I can confidently just run the installer on a VM but I got stuck with Gentoo
There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.
Gentoo is basically arch but built around everything being compiled locally. There isn’t to my knowledge any “Gentoo-install”, but if you can manage to install arch manually it should be quite similar. Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing Gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
Why? How will he progress if he don’t try harder things?
There is still a lot to learn from running arch before you try gentoo
Fair enough, personally I prefer to skip a few steps and then try to figure out what’s going on. It’s not the best approach, but I find it more interesting.
There is literally a gentoo-install: https://github.com/oddlama/gentoo-install
“Install Gentoo” is a meme, not life advice. With Gentoo, the installation process gives you good insight in to the internals of Linux systems and compiling (almost) everything from source is interesting, but won’t produce noticeable benefits for average users. Especially since updates take some time, what with compiling the programs again. Gentoo is a great distro with a fantastic package manager, but unless you’re an enthusiast or a serious hobbyist, Don’t Install Gentoo.
Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.
True and false; the “something special” in Gentoo is that you can tailor it to fit to your needs, and as far as I know no other distro comes even close - maybe the now almost defuct Funtoo. The “it’s more lean on resources” always seemed to me like a strawman people don’t like it came up with to diss on Gentoo.
The point of use flags is to make it so if you don’t want to print, every package that would otherwise pull in CUPS as a dependency can be compiled without it. Stuff like that.
Gentoo also has a good system for handling multiple concurrent installs of different versions of some packages, e.g python.
If there’s software you want to install from source that uses automake it’s pretty simple to build your own package for it.
Very much a system for doing things your way, and a good way to learn linux IMO. To that end, no there is no installer, but the process is not that complex. Boot a live USB, partition and format a drive, download and extract a base system, install a kernel (there is a fits-most-needs one available now), install a bootloader. Reboot into your new system and continue installing what you need from there.
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