Ran gentoo for a decade back in the 2000s, was awesome, then some idiots started breaking everything on a daily basis.
Go back every now and then, builds are SOOO much faster with modern cpus, but there's also no point.
Gentoo is like a fast car on a rail track, you're not actually going anywhere. Arch was OK, but another moron kept breaking expat (pacman needed expat btw). Always hated redhat and ubuntu turned to the dark side.
Some crazy single guys age and stop living so wild, I feel like that's me and distros, a nice cup of debian with a ton of lxcs and vms to bang whenever I'm horny.
Check that, I'm in a thruple with debian and freebsd.
I love Arch and keep it on an old i3 laptop that I use despite having a Core i7 laptop. But for my actual daily desktop computer I use Pop. I don't like being in the middle of some big project and then realizing I need to stop and spend an hour installing some missing package to continue with my project. Pop simplifies all of that, even though it doesn't provide the same sense of accomplishment and old-school computing that I get by using Arch.
I'm tempted to go back, but man, something always breaks, and it's never anything cool, it's always something backwards ass random library for font layout or some shit, and everything just falls on the floor.
But I think I need at least a good arch environment for gaming, debian blows on that regard. I just can't afford to lose my system for half a day because something breaks, if it's a kernel issue I can fix it myself, but not if it's dll layer 8 for the stack used to format yaml files for postscript printing which somehow means all my text editors get linker errors now.
Portage is great, I loved the fact that you can have slots with different versions of the same package.
Nowadays I'm on Debian Stable. I just don't have the time anymore.
I was using Gentoo for some years, and I have to say I do not regret switching to Arch.
That said, power to those chosen or damned to wield Gentoo in the eternal war of kernels. They are the fabric of reality, interstellar light and darkness, they are the reason we, common folks, can live peacefully with precompiled packages, not knowing the pains of building everything from sources.
Many years ago I ran Gentoo as well. Switching to Arch was a considerable upgrade. I admit I've been running Ubuntu since Lucid (aside a brief stint of Fedora). It's nice that things mostly just work. It allows me to focus on life and not wifi drivers. Man, that sounds like such a cop out.
Anyhow, there's part of me that would love to play with those cosmic distros again some day.
What's the appeal of purposely using a user unfriendly system? I'm a Linux beginner and I use easy to use distros. Just curious as to why torture yourself?
I wouldn’t say they are user unfriendly, just not fit for beginners. There are definite advantages to those distros for advanced users, as they offer way more customisation than beginner friendly distros.
Installing an OS by hand and compiling the packages you need on top of a bare bones system is a great learning experience. It also gives you the most flexibility, for better and worse.
Often its to learn about how a linux system works under the hood, also Gentoo can theoreticly have a small performance boost (tho on modern hardware its extremly small).
Ran a stage 1 Gentoo build whilst at uni back in the early 00's. Man building that on my Athlon took an absolute age - and there was no easy way for me to read docs whilst I was putting it together.
Still, ran Gnome DE and did my dissertation on it.
My greatest achievement in life was running on stable gentoo installation for a month. Then I messed up something and never found the courage to get back to it.
I have just flown too close to the sun…