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:

• Jason Lynch
• Paul de Vrieze
• Mike Crute
• Michael Vysin
• Artur Hefczyc
• »Q«
• Joshua Szmajda
• Pranav T

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!