Installing Gentoo itself isn’t really any more difficult than Arch. Though I hear Arch has some easy way to install nowadays. It’s kinda like installing Arch the old fashioned way.
At the end of the day if you follow the official installation guide, you’ll be fine. If you miss a step, you get to learn valuable troubleshooting skills.
Installing anything is as easy as sudo emerge firefox, waiting for an hour for some obscure part in the compile process to fail, giing up, and doing sudo emerge firefox-bin. But tbh outside of browsers, most things compile fine unless you have esoteric optimization flags in your compiler config (-ffast-math breaks AV stuff for an example).
Ah and at some point you’ll go “Hmm this six core CPU isn’t enough, I need to upgrade to 16” because most of your packages will be compiled from scratch. And every update also compiles the same packages again (the ones that need to be updated, not all packages. Unless you specify that).
So why do it? It’s fun, great learning experience and you can customize how your software is compiled (specify your CPU microarchitecture for compiler optimizations, use unsafe optimization flags if you want, use the USE flags to straight up leave functionality you don’t need out of software). Also bragging rights.
Installing Gentoo itself isn’t really any more difficult than Arch. Though I hear Arch has some easy way to install nowadays. It’s kinda like installing Arch the old fashioned way.
At the end of the day if you follow the official installation guide, you’ll be fine. If you miss a step, you get to learn valuable troubleshooting skills.
Installing anything is as easy as
sudo emerge firefox, waiting for an hour for some obscure part in the compile process to fail, giing up, and doingsudo emerge firefox-bin. But tbh outside of browsers, most things compile fine unless you have esoteric optimization flags in your compiler config (-ffast-math breaks AV stuff for an example).Ah and at some point you’ll go “Hmm this six core CPU isn’t enough, I need to upgrade to 16” because most of your packages will be compiled from scratch. And every update also compiles the same packages again (the ones that need to be updated, not all packages. Unless you specify that).
So why do it? It’s fun, great learning experience and you can customize how your software is compiled (specify your CPU microarchitecture for compiler optimizations, use unsafe optimization flags if you want, use the USE flags to straight up leave functionality you don’t need out of software). Also bragging rights.