So you may have heard of the install gentoo meme, when I looked the guidebook I thought it looked a little complex like with Arch.
Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not? Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.
Isn’t there a Gentoo installer like with Arch? With Arch I can confidently just run the installer on a VM but I got stuck with Gentoo
There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.
Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not?
Isn’t there a Gentoo installer like with Arch?
Nope. That’s the “something special”. You do it manually with the help of a very well written handbook and learn a great deal about how an os works. IMO a great experience.
Gentoo is the epitome of RTFM. It is beyond the Arch install in “complexity”.
Gentoo is basically arch but built around everything being compiled locally. There isn’t to my knowledge any “Gentoo-install”, but if you can manage to install arch manually it should be quite similar. Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
There is literally a gentoo-install: https://github.com/oddlama/gentoo-install
Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing Gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
Why? How will he progress if he don’t try harder things?
You can get Gentoo up and running pretty quickly by following the handbook. From memory it’s easy to miss one or two clear instructions because the styling of the handbook can add more eye-catching weight to the explanation than the actual commands. So be sure to re-read areas where things don’t seem to working out.
Gentoo also has a binary repo if you don’t plan to stray from whatever installation profile defaults you start off with.
I can’t confirm a simple server install of Gentoo is somehow more lean than any other distribution.
I’ve used gentoo-install with success previously although I don’t know how up to date it is.
