I might get some folk throwing rocks at me for saying this, but Gentoo. It’s literally “the placebo distro”. As in, “compile pretty much every command your distro has in exchange for a measly half a second faster boot times!”.
Even if you’d say, “Oh, but it does make a difference when running it on my potato!”… just… buy something better already.
“compile pretty much every command your distro has in exchange for a measly half a second faster boot times!”
I don’t deny the existence of people with such motivations, but I’d argue the sheer amount of freedom that Gentoo allows is its defining feature. And for that, even though I don’t use it on my main device, I’d argue it’s actually one of the primary contenders for best distro.
There is no placebo, you can flag stuff out of your builds, so you can have OS without IPv6 anywhere. Or PA support. If you don’t appreciate that, then it’s not for you, but Gentoo does an amazing job of providing freedom with ease of use you can’t find anywhere else.
Sure it takes time to compile, but you just run portage and watch the CPU burn. And if you have enough cores, it doesn’t take all that long.
Also, OpenRC support.
It’s not about the boot times, definitely not about software running faster, everything about having even more control over your computer. Use binary distro if you like, but Gentoo has a place amongst the distros.
I learned most of my Linux skills by starting with Gentoo in the early 2000s after only using Unix and redhat since about '96.
If someone really truly wants to learn Linux (sysadmin types) I tell them to start with Gentoo, not Mint. You don’t learn anything when everything has been dumbed down or obfuscated from you.
I couldn’t have asked for a better distro to learn on, and I’ve been thinking about going back.
Perhaps in the past it was more educational, but nowadays you start with stage3 and everything is so streamlined, that I didn’t learn all that much from installing it.
Gentoo is under ChromeOS’s hood. These optimizations are what enabled accessibly-priced laptops for kids off all economic stratum (even if the Google part is bad).
I always assumed it was just for ease of integrating custom kernels with the binary blobs needed to boot and run the cheap ARM SOCs, plus ease of hacking off and adding on bits as needed
I might get some folk throwing rocks at me for saying this, but Gentoo. It’s literally “the placebo distro”. As in, “compile pretty much every command your distro has in exchange for a measly half a second faster boot times!”. Even if you’d say, “Oh, but it does make a difference when running it on my potato!”… just… buy something better already.
I don’t deny the existence of people with such motivations, but I’d argue the sheer amount of freedom that Gentoo allows is its defining feature. And for that, even though I don’t use it on my main device, I’d argue it’s actually one of the primary contenders for best distro.
Absolutely no to everything you said.
There is no placebo, you can flag stuff out of your builds, so you can have OS without IPv6 anywhere. Or PA support. If you don’t appreciate that, then it’s not for you, but Gentoo does an amazing job of providing freedom with ease of use you can’t find anywhere else.
Sure it takes time to compile, but you just run portage and watch the CPU burn. And if you have enough cores, it doesn’t take all that long.
Also, OpenRC support.
It’s not about the boot times, definitely not about software running faster, everything about having even more control over your computer. Use binary distro if you like, but Gentoo has a place amongst the distros.
I learned most of my Linux skills by starting with Gentoo in the early 2000s after only using Unix and redhat since about '96.
If someone really truly wants to learn Linux (sysadmin types) I tell them to start with Gentoo, not Mint. You don’t learn anything when everything has been dumbed down or obfuscated from you.
I couldn’t have asked for a better distro to learn on, and I’ve been thinking about going back.
Perhaps in the past it was more educational, but nowadays you start with stage3 and everything is so streamlined, that I didn’t learn all that much from installing it.
Gentoo is under ChromeOS’s hood. These optimizations are what enabled accessibly-priced laptops for kids off all economic stratum (even if the Google part is bad).
[citation needed]
I always assumed it was just for ease of integrating custom kernels with the binary blobs needed to boot and run the cheap ARM SOCs, plus ease of hacking off and adding on bits as needed
This is a real answer, unlike the “Ubuntu” memers.