Hi Everybody,

I bought a used Thinkpad X201 i was planning to install a Linux distro. But i'm kind of confused between Gentoo and Arch Linux.
This would be my daily driver.

What do you guys suggest ?


Thank you for your time.

Arch is a LOT faster to install and get up and running (even with a stage III, Gentoo takes quite a while for customization). In theory, Gentoo can be faster. In real life, in 64-bit land, I've never seen the difference between custom built from source packages and generic binary built packages, but YMMV. Both are rather advanced installation, although nothing incredibly difficult, just IMO way longer and more complex than necessary (I stress this is my opinion, and realize others do not share it and there are reasons for why it is the way it is, I simply don't agree). I personally would end up going with ARch though, mostly because installing updates on Gentoo takes eternity if there's large packages to be recompiled and I don't leave my systems running 24/7. Turn them on for 45 minutes to do what I need to do and turn them off, updates once a month or so. This type of usage isn't friendly to Gentoo.

Arch. It won't wear out the computer from all that compiling.

Which one do you like better? Install that one