I mean, is it really worth it to compile every single program that I install? Wouldn’t that be a waste of time? I am inclined to try it out but on the other hand idk
The question you ask in the title is a more general one that you ask in the title.
Yes, Gentoo is a good choice.
No, it is not worth compiling every package. This should not be the main reason you choose Gentoo.
Admittedly, I started with Gentoo for the same reason (per-package compilation), hoping for performance gains. However, I stayed because of the excellent documentation, the great user community; the rolling versions; the customizability and control I have over my system, the choices I need to make when installing, and keep making as the install is continuously set up over the years.
I’ve tried quite a few distros over the (+20) years of Linux-use. I keep choosing Gentoo.
Arch has great documentation, rolling release, and customizability, minus the compilation. Obviously, use Gentoo if you want to. But for advanced Linux users, I highly recommend Arch.
As a long time Gentoo user I tried Arch a few times but the whole AUR mess instead of using the same tools for distro, community and my own packages really put me off.
Use an AUR helper.
The fact that there are so many of those is part of the mess I mentioned.
If you want to REALLY get comfortable with how linux works under the hood, then Gentoo is an awesome learning tool. The amount of choices and customization options is ridiculous, from choosing which features you want to enable(compile) for an app, to choosing between bootloaders, init systems, and so on.
I haven’t used Gentoo in quite a while, but I wouldn’t be a professional Sysadmin today if it weren’t for Gentoo.
I would agree with this. I used Gentoo for a while before moving to Ubuntu.
Gentoo helps you learn and leads (forces) you down the path of getting under the hood to tweak your Linux experience.
I wouldn’t recommend it if you need to build systems quickly for production. I’m sure there are hacks to do it more quickly.
I’m really glad I used it before Ubuntu. I feel like a have a much firmer grasp of the concepts of Linux because of my experience with it.
Gentoo has the best package manager I’ve ever used. But is it worth it? Depends on your expectations. It’s a great distro if you are willing to invest the time and do the work. I would never recommend it to a new user who just wants something that works, but a tech savvy user who is ready to learn (also from mistakes)? Sure, go for it. For me, an update eventually broke it to a point where it was no longer worth the effort, but for a few years I did enjoy tinkering with it. The control you get is intoxicating.
My experience is from mid-00’s, so things may have changed. From other’s comments however, the core experience seems to be the same. I would not install it myself anymore, but that’s not to say it’s a bad distro.
The irony of the “compiling software on modern hardware isn’t bad at all” argument for Gentoo is that the same hardware hardly benefits from custom compiled software. There was a time when hardware was slow and performance improvements could be made, but that was also back when it took ages to compile software, so there was a trade off of time taken up front for performance during real time usage.
If you want to learn Linux internals, build a system using Linux From Scratch. If you want a system that’s maintainable and highly customizable, run Arch Linux. IMO, Gentoo no longer really has a niche.
If you think performance is the main advantage of Gentoo you have not really used it much. The main advantage is that you have the ability to adjust compile time options to drop huge dependencies or include optional features easily and that all the language environments for development are in excellent shape because the distro developers need them themselves.
So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.
Who said anything about disk capacity?
