if you are new to linux, dont jump straight to gentoo. well, you can try Calculate Linux, its a gentoo based distro. can be a good step forward gentoo.
opinions regarding gentoo differ mostly because, priorities of people differ.
if what you are looking for is a unique personalized geeky distro, gentoo is your pick. but its not for the beginers.if you have basic ideas about operating a distro then i will recommend you to try -calculate linux. its good to know gentoo better. much user friendly. im on it

All the best

I bet you were a kid at school/college/wherever and I'm sure you went into hobby shops and gazed at those beautiful model planes or ships that you bought in boxes in millions of little pieces and had to assemble yourself with glue? So much more fun than simply buying the ship/plane 'prebuilt'. Gentoo is like that...there is such a great pleasure in piecing it all together and seeing the final result, especially if it works

i like gentoo. i am running it on my i7 920. but i think i can safely say that even if i had to set each package's USE config, the compile time even on a i7 is probably more than any speed gains over its lifetime use (compared to say debian).

i like it because it offers something different. and the fact that i can run radeon drivers which perform as well as the fglrx drivers in debian.

In fact, when I install a Gentoo box, I always change something inside the Use or even the WM and I can tell that Gentoo is not a distro, but a Metadistribution.

Gentoo can be great. It is worth the effort if you want a lean system that you know "everything" about. My aging P4 (1.7GHz, 512MB RDRAM) has a Gentoo build that I think I did mid 2008. It took me an entire weekend to build the base system, X, and KDE 3.5. Since then, I've only recompiled stuff on an as needed basis. My system boots to login in about 15s, and less then 5s avg to go from login to desktop. With that said, on other systems (laptop, newer desktop) I use Fedora/RH, Slackware, Debian, etc for convenience of install time and all that.

Also, Gentoo is great on alternative archs (SGI Octane anyone?).

And in case of a crash, you can still dual boot your hdd with an another linux distro or even use a LiveCD to chroot your box and debug :P

There are certainly problems with Gentoo, as there are with any Linux distro. However, I have found that nothing (not even Arch) comes close to allowing me to have the type of customisation that I can attain with Gentoo. I don't like having to deal with all the cruft that other distros install by default, and I personally like to configure most things manually. For the things that I don't like to do by hand, there are tools that can be installed. Just as one example, I don't like dealing with wireless internet settings manually, so I installed wicd to handle those settings. Contrapositively, I like to configure my kernel manually, so I do.

In the end, Gentoo may take longer to install and may require more effort to maintain, but to me it is completely worth it as it allows me to build my system EXACTLY how I want it.

To give a more philosophical answer, everything/everybody has its/their own place in this world. So, the very question that is gentoo (or any other distro) 'worthy' is flawed.

My personal stand (even during discussion with my friends) is that its more correct to ask is a distro 'for me', than asking questions like which distro is best or if a particular distro is worthy. Since this 'is it for me' revolves around my expectations/needs, the answer differs from time to time for the same distro! I started with Ubuntu as it served me well as a newbie. Now I've started to like more challenging distros like Fedora, Arch, Gentoo and Slackware. I don't use Ubuntu regularly now.

In fact, for my concern I use Gentoo on my desktop, Ubuntu on my laptop since he will die because of a hdd failure :P

And at work, I use Gentoo testing and FreeBSD.

So basically, I use Linux and *BSD for a specific purpose and I like it a lot :P

I don't understand the part about your laptop and the HDD failure. I have Gentoo on all my laptops, including my netbooks.

For an unknown reason, when I use a binary distro, I don't hear the tic tac.... it must be when I compile, maybe I don't write at all on a specific part of the HDD and that's why I don't hear nothing.

Any theory about my problem ?

I'd start with smartmontools, and do some tests.

The heavy tic-tac noise is usually a symptom that the life of the drive is about to end. However we can't be sure it's the same tic-tac we refer to without hearing it ourselves.

Compile times really what made me dump Gentoo. It's good enough as it is, but when you start to pull down dependencies and start to compile all of them, it made me tear my hair out. When you want to install a non-trivial desktop or GUI application with around 10-12 dependencies, it can take ages just to get the programs you want installed. On most binary distributions, the installation time is limited to downloading the packages and running the package commands (or automatically in case of a package manager).

I am not really 100% convinced that the time wasted (and yes, CPU cycles as well) in compiling is compensated by the 'optimized' nature of the end result. I really didn't notice all that big a performance difference between Gentoo and binary distributions like Debian or Slackware and I suspect most ordinary users on modern hardware won't.

I can certainly understand the sense of satisfaction you get out of building a Linux system just the way you want it and I had it too for a while, but over time, that feeling has left me and I have lots more work to do than to watch gcc's messages fly past on a terminal screen.

Be aware that if you want a relatively large list of applications like I do (I do Python programming, web development with PHP/MySQL/SQLite/Apache, maintain my website, draw comics, do video encoding, editing and creating DVDs, audio editing as well as play games occasionally), compiling and upgrading the system from time to time will take a sizable chunk of uptime.

Gentoo however, has a very solid package system and is compelling reason enough for many people.

Whomever is using gentoo because of that reason is probably lost, except in a few corner cases.

Having less dependencies is a good thing however, binaries are smaller and has less dependencies, which means less links to establish as run time, less disk seeks, etc.

Binary package systems are a hell to maintain, so I can't really understand why people think they are so easy... To start with, you have to reinstall each time that something critical needs update, like glibc, because all the binaries break with each new api. In Gentoo I have been using the same installation for many years, and the only time I've needed to reinstall is when it came the time to migrate from x86 to x86_64. So I can actually concentrate on my work instead of having to worry about updates and reconfiguring the same system again and again. As you see, it all depends on the lense you look through


It's not like you have to be in front of your pc while it compiles. Emerge has reached a great level of automation and if something fails it will continue with the next package, it can even resolve some blocks alone nowadays. You can launch emerge in the night and then check the output in the morning.