Why Gentoo?

Posted on 7 Apr 08 at 00:39 | Tagged as ,

image by Paul Downey

Recently Distrowatch editor Ladislav Bodnar complained:

I keep saying the same thing every time people come here to defend Gentoo: please write an article explaining why Gentoo is the greatest thing since sliced pickles and I’ll publish it in the next issue of DistroWatch Weekly. Or write a review. Write about your experiences running Gentoo as a desktop or server. Anything. I know it doesn’t look like it, but I really am desperate for some positive coverage of Gentoo! Many of you obviously love Gentoo and have tons of great experiences with it, so why don’t you share them?

Do we Gentoo users write so little about why we love this distro? I didn’t think so, so I fired up Google’s blogsearch and immediately found several blogposts explaining why people use Gentoo, by:

There is also a “Why do you use Gentoo” thread on the forums. So yes, we do share our positive experiences with Gentoo, but maybe Mr. Bodnar isn’t looking in the right places?

So what are our reasons for preferring Gentoo? I think they can be summarized as follows:

  • great degree of control, no wizards, but plain-text configuration files, which empowers the users
  • fine-grained optimization possibilities, through USE flags, multiple available versions of many packages, choosing your own CFLAGS, and so on
  • great documentation available, both official and community generated
  • good learning experience: the manual install method and hands-on configuration offer more opportunities to get to know how things work
  • continuous updates, independent from media releases
  • saner way of handling dependencies, because everything is compiled from source
  • high number of available packages, and ease of adding your own ebuilds
  • great community with many helpful people

And what are your reasons for using Gentoo? Let’s hear it!

22 comments

  1. Jason on 7 Apr 08 at 01:35:

    It’s been a while since I wrote that post, but it pretty much still stands. I like Ubuntu for a few reasons, but I still feel far more at home using Gentoo.

    As an example, my desktop is now six years old, and I’ve reached a point where I just don’t want to compile packages on it anymore, so I’ve installed Ubuntu on it. It feels like the system is so much more opaque, and that mere users aren’t meant to touch the details. I can figure out things like the init scripts, but Gentoo’s definitely more transparent in that area.

    I can’t figure out what I want to install on my laptop. I like the ease of Ubuntu, but it just doesn’t feel right, probably due to a combination of factors.

  2. Aggelos Orfanakos on 7 Apr 08 at 02:11:

    Nice post! It neatly sums up the reasons why I use Gentoo, and Gentoo only.

    Keep it up!

  3. Brian on 7 Apr 08 at 02:38:

    Your list summed it up well. When I started many years back it was the learning experience and good docs. Now it’s control and customization and extensibility.

    I like Gentoo because every time I use a non-source distro, I end up having to compile many things from source anyways to get them to work properly / at all. And then all hell breaks loose. Mostly I like Gentoo because it tends to work fine for every app I want to throw at it; what more does anyone need?

  4. Kamil Kisiel on 7 Apr 08 at 04:53:

    I posted my reasoning and some details of my organization’s setup on my blog: http://kamilkisiel.blogspot.com/2008/04/why-gentoo.html

    Keep up the good work, and thanks to all the Gentoo devs for making such a great distro.

  5. LXj on 7 Apr 08 at 07:32:

    > but maybe Mr. Bodnar isn’t looking in the right places?

    I think in resources like Distrowatch editors are not seeking the content actively (except maybe official distribution sites), they are accepting the articles sent to them

    (I didn’t actually look at Distrowatch, but I have an experience of publishing articles at Linux.com)

  6. comzeradd on 7 Apr 08 at 07:52:

    an old post of mine:
    http://autoverse.net/index.php?f=2&id=21

  7. tangram on 7 Apr 08 at 08:37:

    Nice article.

    Yep you’ve nailed all the reasons why I use Gentoo. ;)

    But what drove initially to Gentoo was the learning experience and the exemplary documentation. As soon as I was amazed with the documentation I just drove into the system pretty much by all the other reasons you’ve compiled.

  8. tob on 7 Apr 08 at 11:21:

    Hi,
    i think you missed the most important one: It’s fun!
    :-)

  9. Moltonel on 7 Apr 08 at 12:06:

    You didn’t explicitly mention one which is a killer-feature for me : safely and easily mix packages with varying degree of stability.

    Cherry-picking “unstable” or “testing” packages to put on a “stable” system is painfull and dangerous (if at all possible) with binary distros.

  10. I wanna spend all your money... on 7 Apr 08 at 13:05:

    [...] by tante in brainfart, english, gentoo, tech at 14:09 Gentoo developer Ben de Groot wrote a short bit about the “Why Gentoo?” question, especially since a distrowatch editor had complained that no one ever wrote anything about that [...]

  11. tante on 7 Apr 08 at 13:06:

    Wrote my own “Why Gentoo?” answer here: http://the-gay-bar.com/index.php?/archives/1252-Why-Gentoo.html

  12. Ben on 7 Apr 08 at 13:40:

    Thank you so much Kamil, comzeadd and tante, for adding your voices. It’s always good to read positive stories to balance the complaints and rants that inevitably also exist.

    Jason, I agree with you. I try other distros from time to time, to see what they have to offer. But nothing feels as ‘right’ as Gentoo does for me.

    LXj: That may be the case, but if he is as desperate as he says he is, he doesn’t have to look far, is all I’m saying…

    tob: You’re absolutely right. It’s fun!

    Moltonel: That is indeed a good addition.

  13. Ines on 7 Apr 08 at 13:50:

    I use Gentoo because it allows me to install packages without beeing told “I know what you want and this version doesn’t suit your needs” by anything or anyone besides myself. It’s although a great opportunity to learn – some defaults are sane enough to run a service just for my local mashine, but if I want more, I go and read the dokumentation an learn how to actually set up this service.

    Keep on with the great work gentoo-devs! I’m far from helping but learning to understand how things work.

  14. furanku on 7 Apr 08 at 18:48:

    I’ld say the quetion is more: Why read Distrowatch? It’s not that I want to bash against that site, but their statistics and reviews seemed to be overrated IMHO. It’s something between “My favourite Linux” and “Hype of the month” – but nothing with “real” relevance in terms of reliable numbers or reproducible tests.

  15. Ferdi on 8 Apr 08 at 00:19:

    Short answer: Overlays, use flags, emerge –depclean, community.

    And the longer answer…

    Initially I became interested in Gentoo because I wanted to play around with an early beta version of php5. That must have been around 2003/2004.

    So far I had used Debian. Over the years I had moved from stable to testing and finally to unstable with all it’s glitches. For a long time I had wished to have a mixed system with the largest part being stable but just some selected packages (and required dependencies) more up to date. I wasn’t able to reliably get that approach working in Debian.

    Searching for alternatives I read a lot about the BSDs and eventually found out about distrowatch. I became interested in Gentoo due to the up to date package database, it’s similarities with freeBSD and the big, focussed community.

    Since then I never looked back. I absolutely love the ability to quickly bump a package by simply coying an ebuild to my overlay. I also prefere writing simple ebuilds for unavailable software instead of littering the system with manual installs. In most cases working ebuild can be found in bugzilla. I really like use flags for their ability to exclude unwanted dependencies. I absolutely love cfg-update.

    Since that very first day with Gentoo I never installed a second system from scratch. I just cloned my running system to the discs of new notebooks or servers, changed some preferences (mainly network settings and kernel config), uninstalled unneeded, installed needed packages and ran emerge –depclean && revdep-rebuild.

    Just for the record: Execution speed never was a concern of mine. I update daily and use ccache and distcc. Updates mostly take some minutes running in the background.

  16. Willem on 8 Apr 08 at 06:01:

    With using Gentoo you will always have all the sources on your system, this is a kind of guarantee that the software is open source. Also, you are always sure you have everything you need to recompile an application or the complete system. You need nothing else than a good backup to have the perfect escrow arrangement. This guarantees a long time use of every application with the option to start adapting it to your own needs.

  17. César on 8 Apr 08 at 16:27:

    I use Gentoo because it gives me the tools to fine tune my servers. I build web, mail, dns and file services with Gentoo and it’s all about saving resources and only installing necessary software to run the services you need. I personally like to have the control of every piece of software installed in my systems.

    So, in summary:

    a) Fine tunning.
    b) Total control with the software installed.
    c) The handbook is an invaluable piece of information to reduce your learning curve with the system.It worked for me.

    Cheers.

  18. aron on 8 Apr 08 at 19:30:

    Here’s my thoughts on the matter. Old post too.

  19. Draino on 10 Apr 08 at 08:11:

    Once upon a time…

    I was using FreeBSD. Frustrated with the lack of kernel drivers I needed at the time (Video, VMWare etc.) I chose to move away from it, but then came UNI and Windows tried to get me with vendor lock-in. Luckily I escaped the clutches of Microsoft and went back to using (Debian) Linux but I missed my ports collection ever so much. I was delighted to hear about Gentoo (a few years back) and I have never considered changing since.

    Now I compute happily ever after :)

    I felt inclined to respond also (see URL).

  20. Sarah White on 20 Jul 08 at 03:02:

    I just linked to this from my own (myspace) blog… my first myspace blog entry even lol. Any case, nothing but praise, and I linked instead of plagerizing. Kudos =^_^=

  21. Melody on 20 Jul 08 at 14:04:

    um, well I was always confused when anyone talks about computer stuffs but great information:)

  22. Ben on 20 Jul 08 at 14:16:

    Thanks for the kudos and appreciation, Sarah and Melody.

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