Just wanna preface, I’m not trying to like attack Gentoo or anyone that uses it, I just wanna understand lol

I’m like an intermediate Linux user I’m definitely not an expert, and Gentoo is something I’m still quite confused about. To me it just seems unnecessary, like the real version of people making Arch just seem incredibly complicated. Does anyone actually use it as a daily driver? Why? Is it just for the love of the game? Is there some specific use case I’ve not heard or thought of?

  • Mikelius@lemmy.ml
    10·
    11 hours ago

    I use it for my media server and have been for a long time.

    Tldr: started so I could learn and understand Linux, still use it since I’m comfortable with it and it’s familiar/fast for my needs.

    How it started: I kept going back and forth between windows and Linux, but never truly understood Linux like I did Windows. I eventually decided that I should try to install a Linux distro from scratch and learn the entire process manually so that I could understand it at a strong level. Gentoo has some of the best, if not the best, documentation for this. After spending several days going through the entire install process to finally get that login screen and UI up and running, I had learned more about Linux in those few days than I did the previous 3 years. I wanted to keep going, so I kept it on that laptop and continued to learn and become way more efficient than even Windows.

    Why I still use it, specifically for my media server: partly because I understand Gentoo more than any other distro I’ve used, so I’m extremely comfortable with it. But mostly because I know every little thing on my server. I never find things I don’t recognize, because I installed it. I made the explicit decision to all the software I installed on my system. And I truly do feel like I’m in absolute control of the entire thing, in and out. On top of this, it’s truly as high in performance as it sounds.

    As I type this, my media server is running 76 docker containers (no, not 76 services), 4 of which are game servers I host 24/7 for friends, and I’m only using 32GB of memory. CPU is rarely, if ever, above 20% (12 core Ryzen). The need to upgrade is really far out there, so that just adds to my reasons to continue using it. That being said, I’ve never run something like a Debian media server with all the same stuff on it… It’s very possible it’s just as good, but I really don’t know. I’m too comfortable where I am to spend time finding out lol.