- pros:
I like the fact that you can compile everthing from source: you can optimze it for your hardware and you can specify with which support you want to compile your applications.
I also liked the minimal install. You start from scratch and only install the things you want.
The install cd has now support for my wireless card (ipw2200)

- cons:
I have the feeling that Gentoo forces you to do everything the Gentoo way. You just execute some commands that are Gentoo specific.
I didn't like that I have to install some packages from the unstable branche to get everything working: for wireless internet at startup, you have to emerge the baselayout from unstable. I thought Gentoo was bleeding edge, but the latest stable kde is 3.3, I'd like to see kde 3.4 stable soon.

For years I tried several of the binary distros. Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, and Slackware. These all had thier pros and cons. With each I felt that there was a level of control that I was missing. I did not like the way that, if I installed one package to get one feature I had to bring in all the junk that was needed for every other feature. Gentoo allows you to turn off certain features and thus avoid bringing in dependencies that only that feature needs. Debian comes the closest to allow this level of control but it does not succeed completely.

One of the other things that has always bugged me is the upgrade process when a new version of the fundemental libraries are needed ( like glibc ). Under Gentoo this process is automatic, it takes a while but it really is automatic. With other binary based distros, you need to wait for the package maintainers to release a new "rpm" or "deb" file that uses the new libraries and sometimes these new files will come with dependecies that you don't want. With Gentoo this is a thing of the past.

With binary based distros you have to wait for the distro maintainers to release a new version to get significant upgrades like moving to a new kernel. With gentoo, you can move to the latest kernel and just recompile everything.

This level of control comes at a price. The portage system is easy to use for the experienced *Nix user but it can be difficult for the novice user. I suggest getting your feet wet with Debian or RedHat. The compile time can be an issue, especially on an older machine. I have a dual Pentium II system running gentoo and it takes a while to complete a compile.

For newbies: this is not the Distribution for you. The installation is quite indepth and requires a decent knowledge of Linux to correctly configure.

For the Moderate user: Excellent distribution to learn a little bit more about Linux in general and how to configure everything (well, not everything) yourself.

For Advanced users: Some may not like it since you have to do everything the "Gentoo" way. Those who know their way around Linux don't like doing it this way.

Overall, it is a very fast and machine specific distribution. The Portage database is very big, so most software is easy to install (if you're willing to wait for compilation) and also offers extreme configuration through the USE command.

I have, over time, converted all but one of my linux boxes to Gentoo. Gentoo has had every piece of software I've ever wanted built right into it's 'Portage' package management system. It's amazingly customizable. I'll be honest, it doesn't run any faster than any other distro (despite some fanatics claims), but I do like that I can have the OPTION of such-and-such support in FooBar v 1.2... or NOT.

Portage is, without a doubt, my favorite package management system.

Brilliant - I installed it on one machine to try it out, and ended up migrating all my linux machines to it.

Although it does not have an automatic installer, it has a brilliant online handbook, detailing all stages of the installation process. Definitly good if you are interested in learning more about how linux works.
Getting Xorg to work with my laptop was a problem, but again there is some excellent stuff on the internet helping you with almost any problem

I would suggest it to anyone - beginners or pros

Simply the best.

After 10 years using Linux I found on this distro all I liked in Linux, plus some extra features at no cost like getting rid of most of the dependency headaches among binary packages in normal distros.

The drawback is that Gentoo is not made for the newbie, you will need at least basic knowledge in linux administration.

Another negative aspect is that the portage system is all too heavy for the normal desktop user and compiling times can get very long.

On the other side, when you own a small home network you will be able to get the most out of gentoo using a centralized portage filesystem, distributed compilation and centralized rsync, which means a generally faster system and a better use of your home network.

Let me first say that I disagree the Gentoo isn't for noobs - well, maybe you ought to have graduated to novice.

I tried maybe half a dozen distros before finally landing on Gentoo. I was never really satisfied with any of the distros due to the copious amount of needless software that gets installed and the lack of customization in a lot of distros. I very much like Slackware, but the lack of a 64-bit distro drove me else, hence Gentoo.

I had considered for a while dabbling with Linux From Scratch in order to get down and dirty and learn the ins and outs of Linux, but I'm fairly new to Linux and it seemed a little daunting to me. Gentoo is almost there, and although it doesn't go quite as deep as LFS it forces you to get intimate with the various config files from the get go and in the process learn a large portion of what's going on behind the scenes which you can and will apply during normal use.

Now, I'm no Linux guru. I've been an MS user going back to DOS 3.1 and just starting looking to switch over within the past year. I've been messing around on and off since then, but now with Gentoo the past three weeks I've only booted into Windows to play Lego Star Wars!

Even if you're a noob, if you know what to do with a command prompt (any prompt) I think you can get your head around Gentoo. It's got great documentation, a good wiki and good forums to help you out. Just pay attention to what you're doing and prepare to invest a lot of time into it.

Gentoo... Gentoo is a "meta" distro, which means that there is no real centralized install CD's. Instead, you install everything from the internet. Gentoo's packages are automatically compiled from source, and for that matter, there are very few binary packages (that I know of) for Gentoo. Because you compile (most) everything from source, installations take a longer time, both the initial, and installing packages. But it's worth it.

Gentoo is all about ultimate customizability. With gentoo, it's a snap to install any package under the sun. As I've heard (and experienced now), debian's apt system is very similar. With gentoo, you can easily make a speed-oriented desktop (my own choice), an ultra-secure webserver, a router & firewall, a file server, or anything else your heart can imagine.

So what makes gentoo different?

Its package manager. When you want to install, say, KDE, you simply type (as root) 'emerge kde' and you're done. Gentoo automatically goes out to the internet and downloads the latest updated packages and all the packages they require and installs all them for you. No worrying about if you have the necessary dependencies, no worring about specific package support options, this is all handled in the configuration.

Gentoo's package system, portage, manages support by "USE" flags. If you put cdrw in your USE flags, you will get support for cd recording. If you put kde in your USE flags, you will get KDE support, the same goes with qt, gnome, alsa, cups, or anything else you can imagine.

Not only that, but you can specify compiler options for installing packages. You want your packages installed for your architechure? Add --march=foo to the C & CXXFLAGS variables. You want to have -fomit-frame-pointer and -pipe? So be it! You want to have level 3 speed optimazations in GCC? So be it!

The only real dissapointment with gentoo is that you can't use binary packages. Don't get me wrong, I like using source packages (to avoid the extra stuff I don't need), but it does take a long time to compile X, or KDE, or k3b, or GNOME, or any other larger packages that you can think of.

However, the run more stable and faster (depending on what compiler options you provide) if you compile them from source.

When you think gentoo, think customizablility. From me, Gentoo gets a 10/10

It's a distro full of contraddition: simple and lovely for who LOVES Linux, for who find Linux the best way to do hi-end, hi-level servers, for advanced / experts / guru users... and, in the other side, it's hard, time-consuming, difficult to understand and to configure.

By the way, these are only opinion given by different skill levels, it depends on which writes it... the only thing that is SURE about Gentoo Linux is that this distro is one of the more stable, flexible and well-documentated distro ever heard.

I had to set up a "test" server with an Apache 2 webserver, MySQL 4.(mmmh... I cant remember which version :p....), SSH, Samba, VS-FTPd, a mail switcher (qmail or sendmail, no matters...) and few other local tools (such as a telnet client, VI editor, a browser, some libraries...). A lot of things that could justify the choice for well-builded binary distro, Red Hat "et similia". So, why a Gentoo? It seems that I've only loose three days to install, configure and set-up this "small" server, but these three days has been only well spent time: I learned A LOT of things, that I knowed such a little, about Linux kernel; I faced some little problem with "devfs" and I learned how to fix it (useful for the future :p); most of all, I COMPILED and WELL CONFIGURED (with "portage", of course) all the packages and I experienced a VERY FAST SERVER, such as the double of the power that could gave me a binary distro not optimized for Intel(R) HT technology. This "test environment", infact, is builded on a simple HP desktop with a P4 3.2Ghz HT. I've not done some benchmark, but ofcourse on that machine was installed a Fedora C3 with both Apache 2 and MySQL, and OFCOURSE I experienced a growing speed when MySQL parses such as 2000 "insert" queries consequentially... It takes such as 5-6 seconds. Could a binary, pre-compiled version of Linux-MySQL response as quickly as this one?

In spite of difficulties, slowliness, "Gentoo-way" and many others "cons" reported by everybody who's face this distro, I think that performances given by this kind of approach are the real advantage given by the "Gentoo-way", and ofcourse it's a huge advantage when we must compare another distro with this one.

I reccomend it to newbies: it's the BEST way to learn something about Linux... and, DON'T FORGET TO READ ALL THE MANUAL BEFORE START THE INSTALLATION, and another time DURING the installation, ofcourse :)

I'm like the next AMD owner
we need programs to be specifically made for my processor

I don't own intel Pentium 1 so most binaries run slower than compiled from source binaries. sometimes even slower than a pentium 1

but this distro is a disgrace (installtion wise)
The installer is the first thing the public will see of your product. Gentoo teaches you about the core workings of linux you'll say.
No it doesnt in reality emerge/portage does your day to day compiling and scripting tasks (what you mainly would need to learn in linux),
how many times in your life will you ever use chroot? ever? env-update? configure grub? with completely different notation than linux kernel uses (hd0,1 opposed to hda1)

I had to study for hours on end to manage to install gentoo and grub. How hard would it have been for the installer to have a half and half screen (one side shows help file automatically at boot and other sde is terminal for installing gentoo) or even better a simple script not even a gui installer,that does the steps and prompts for input of your options
printf("which is your root partition hda hdb hdc hdd?");
scanf("%s%" &drive);
mount /dev/%drive /mnt/gentoo
cd /mnt/gentoo
printf("what optimization do you wish to use?/n1 athlon /n2 pentium") etc

tar -xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages-%optim.tar/bz2




do you wish to install syslog
if yes then emerge syslog-ng
endif
do you wish to install crond?

etc etc etc

Gentoo is a great distro. I started my personal Linux explorations with Fedora Core 3 and Mandrake, and use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Debian at work. I moved on to Gentoo at home after getting a little frustrated with the lack of control Fedora and Mandrake offered me.

Gentoo is initally pretty daunting to install but the installation HOWTO is excellent and takes you through the process step-by-step. I didn't encounter any difficulties getting through the installation, despite beign a fair newbie..

Once installed it works brilliantly and installing and upgrading software is super, using Portage, Gentoo's package manager. Portage compiles all apps from source. This does mean that things take a bit longer to get installed than on binary distro's, especially on a slow PC, but it means that the apps always install without problems and are optimised to your setup and PC. It manages dependencies perfectly on installation, just installing them for you, but there are a couple of dependency difficulties to get over when uninstalling software.

My main gripe with Gentoo is that sometimes installing apps like Xine, Apollo, etc is faffy. These apps come pretty much pre-setup when installing on other distros, but on Gentoo you need to faff around to get them working. Also there are very few interfaces for configuring Gentoo and the computer. Of course it is preferable and more "Gentoo-esq" to do it through the command line, its a little annoying for a noob who just wants to change some settings!

Overall Gentoo is an excellent distro. Stable, powerful, adaptable and well built, but not newbie friendly. Use it after practicing on other distros, and then keep it forever! You'll learn loads about Linux and it just works.

After the 11th Gentoo build I decided to think ahead.
Let's start with a 2005.0 GRP build = stage3-pentium4 download + packages
Most of the necessary packages are there, using my previous kernel & modules, so it's a Gnome WM and 1 hour later I've finished all the conf files and I'm migrating data off the old partition. Haven't done that with a distro before.. I agree a lot of the install could have been scripted, right up to entering the chroot, so it's the next task. Get it down to about 20 mins.
I seriously wanted to avoid compiling gcc X and openoffice and I'm happy with the results so far.
I'm using quickpkg to build binaries for the other boxes, and investigating iptables/patch-o-matic/kernel integration.
I'm seriously disappointed with USE flags for MPlayer, preferring to build it manually. Got the dependencies ok, but the build keeps dropping set flags.
The change from devfs to udev was excellent, usb devices are much happier.
It's getting easier each time, which is how it should be..!

I'm a fairly good linux user - "user" being the key word. I do too much with my system to admin it daily or even weekly or monthly. I'll do updates a few times a year, but out side of that, I want it stable, fast, easy, and ready for work at anytime. Gentoo provides that for me.

Slack comes close, and I do keep it on a hard drive and bootable 'just in case' (i.e. hard drive crash, etc).

Besides the 3 day stage 1 install (between work and sleep), and the occasional system wide updates (12-24 hours on a athlon xp 1900+) Gentoo is a great system.

If you like linux and want to learn a bit and experiment, I strongly suggest you try it. The install manual is great and not just gives the steps, but gives the reasons for the steps - I nice learning tool.

And if you do install it for the first time, here is the best tip I can offer:
Spend extra time making sure you have everything you need in your make.conf file before you emerge the system.

My favorite distro so I am biased.Unlimited packages,great documentation and user community.Not for the faint of heart.Requires knowledge and user intervention.You will update system configuration files.Very fast and responsive system, but not any faster than slackware.Once installed and configured properly very stable.

The best documented distro I've ever met ; I also tried RH, Mandrake, Debian,Knopix.

Well organized site,nice wiki, and pretty good forum.
( although I am desappointed that it lack spell checking )

From the simple install you'll learn a lot of new things.
I've tried it to install twice:
1. once as my first distro , I spent a lot of time , after wich I just give up with it
2. after I've become quiet familiar with Linux... even in this case I spent more then a week ( between work and sleep , plus full week-end time) to properly install and configure it . But after I've finally got a functional fentoo linux box with all stuff that I need on my PC, I was very excited Besides I've learned a lot.

If you already don't have a problem with mounting partitions , tar , ls , cd , make , and you heard about /etc/passwd, /etc/fstab , /etc/inittab , /etc/lilo.conf , then I think its time for you to switch to best linux distro -- G E N T O O ;)

At the risk of repeating what everyone says about Gentoo...

The Gentoo philosophy of not forcing options on the user boils down to a FreeBSD-like "asking the user for everything" Linux distro. Gentoo will often present the user with a list of options and say something like "I'll let you do this, but seriously, it will probably break me!" which is rather un Windows-like and makes me happy. I also run Fedora Core and FreeBSD, but Fedora has been moving in a very Windows-like "user friendly" (read: bloated) direction that I'm not so pleased with.

Anyone that has experienced FreeBSD's ports system and isn't an "apt-get rules even though it doesn't really" Debian-o-phile, will appreciate Gentoo's Portage system. Portage is perhaps Gentoo's best feature and is wildly better than FreeBSD Ports, which itself is (IMHO) better than any (non-Gentoo) Linux package management system that I have used... That said, you'd better get a good book and a fast computer becuase the point of both Gentoo Portage and FreeSBD Ports is that everything is compiled from source. The Gentoo community will provide pre-compiled binaries of apps that take forever to compile and are frequently updated, like Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird, but most seem to choose compiling from source anyway.

The installation of Gentoo is unique in that you boot a Live-Gentoo CD to set everything up and install one of three stages (1 compiles EVERYTHING from source, 2 comes with a few of the biggies pre-compiled, and 3 is basically a binary distribution) after which you chroot into your new Gentoo installation and install the rest with emerge (the front-end of Portage). Getting to this point really does require some familiarity with *NIX systems though, and I would say that someone fresh from Windows or Mac will run away screaming if they even make it as far as the often overnight compiliation of Xorg and KDE (or Gnome).

Of course half the point of Gentoo is optimization and Gentoo offers a central /etc/make.conf file for setting compiler flags and the like. If you spend a little quality time tweaking Gentoo and installing only what you need, you'll wind up with a faster system and smaller footprint than (AFAIK) any main-stream binary distro; double true for Fedora. Gentoo is also wonderfully organized which make tweaking settings intuative to anyone with experience running Linux. It is also very robust becuase you can always boot back to the install CD to fix your installation, chroot into it, etc.

I've been using Linux since '97, but wasn't able to completely ween myself from Windows until about 4 years ago. I've only been using Gentoo since the 2005 release (it has taken over both my desktop and laptop though), but I've often found myself spontaneously donating money to the Gentoo Foundation when my computer does something wonderful that I didn't expect, like recovering from hard drive failures without having to re-install or finding a whole section of chemistry related apps in Portage or even firing off custom kernel compiles flawlessly with genkernel.

So I'm giving Gentoo a perfect score with the caviot that it isn't for everyone, but those that do mesh with the Gentoo philosophy (like I have) will never go back.

i like the fact of compiling everything so the os is geared towards your specific hardware. emerge is a really good installer because it installed the dependenecies as well as the program that you are installing thats a bonus. as for the lengthy install yeah it takes a long time to get anything installed but it is a con i can live with because i hate looking on the internet for every little package that something relies on . the con is a graphical installer but if you know apt-get you shouldnt have a problem because emerge is similar to apt-get in the style in the command line . well if someone can get synaptic to work with emerge then there is your graphical installer there. well overall i will give this distro an eight because all in all it is a good distro

I fully reccommend this distrobution for all Linux users to try at least once, if only to go through the installation and learn about how the internals of Linux are set up.

Sadly, that is the only reason that I use Gentoo. I tried it for a while, and it is a pretty nice distrobution. Large package database, wonderful forum help from their website, and customization. But the drawbacks come when you need to do your next big update. I don't happen to have the fastest computer (667 mHz), so installing something like OpenOffice.org took me literally three days of letting my computer compile, just sitting there.

Word of advice: If you use Gentoo, if it's for more than just a learning process (many installations that I've done spanned multiple days because there's so many things that require user intervention within the installation), go ahead and use the binaries to install first, then set your customizations and re-compile everything in the background, once you've already got your system going.

Doing this method, I think, would tend to keep the frustration level down when installing, and will give you the "hey look! Something is happenning!" feeling that I think is so necessary to keep the excitement up.

In Summary: Gentoo is good, but it's mainly for the tinkerer. But it is an anazing learning tool, especially because of it's amazing documentation and forum support for answering questions.

Gentoo is a distribution that is, usually, installed piece by piece; compiling all packages from source. This may sound extreme but I now know why: Stability and control.
Having now done three Gentoo installs; the second being a re-do of the first on my own machine and the third a "courageous" complete migration from Windoze ME for my wife's work machine, I am very impressed. The machines are stable, I have absolute control over what is installed on them, and the Portage software management system is easy to use but also very versatile. Gentoo also has a very complete/extensive offering of Linux applications; including access to testing and beta versions of most packages. As a bonus, I learned more, about Linux and computers in general, while struggling through the set-ups. I must confess that my problems were caused, mostly, by being in a hurry and not reading carefully. Which is a sad excuse, as Gentoo is one of the the best documented projects I have ever encountered and the two days of set-up and compiling were more than a fair exchange for over six months, now, for the first/2nd install, of smooth running.
In short, for me, Gentoo, IS Linux.