I ran Gentoo on our Ryzen 5800X computer… But we had to stop with that because after all my tinkering we didn’t have a usable enough system capable of doing the things we needed, like running Steam.
I have developed a love/hate relationship with portage. It’s very powerful letting you get at all the compiler flags. I like that. But it was too unwieldy also and parts of it felt a little outdated.
What I need for my workstation is something that is very powerful and efficient but also highly robust and stable enough to serve as the base for all my usages.
Maybe I’ll try Funtoo. Thought about NixOS or something but don’t want to do that really.
Looks like the creator of Gentoo has a YouTube: Daniel Robbins / BDFLFUN2
I use Gentoo as my main system, and it’s a usable system for me. It’s even quite stable, when things break it’s usually because I did something stupid. But my needs might be different from yours, as I don’t use Steam, nor do I intend to.
I never messed with the compiler flags, since they’re applied to every package, which makes the risk of breaking things fairly big. The only flags I set are
-march=native -O2 -pipeand also I setMAKEOPTS="-j4"to compile in all 4 threads.I do most of my customization over USE flags, and I think they’re a great concept. The thing that frustrates me most about Portage is how slow the calculating of the dependencies is.
Yeah Funtoo is I guess supposed to be better in certain ways… My portage got screwed up when I went about doing complicated stuff. Which is also what happens on my arch system.
Can’t say how much of it is their problem or not vs mine but in practice it doesn’t matter to me. Luckily for my workstation I plan to do all the complex stuff in VMs and containers…
I think it’s between Funtoo, Debian, Arch, NixOS/Guix… Think its really between Funtoo and NixOS/Guix since I need a system that supports building things from source, and I need something that is robust and won’t leave my system broken.
