Why I Still Choose Gentoo

After a ten day trial of Arch, I found myself still craving the superior flexibility and control of Gentoo. Despite being more intensive to set up, I was relieved to have that speedy distribution back on my system, and now, I’ve found that when it comes to installing Linux, my only choice is Gentoo. Here are some of my reasons why I use Larry the Cow’s favourite operating system:

Gentoo takes much longer to install and set up compared to most other distributions; no one is denying that. However, even though it does take much longer, the trade off is the amount of control you get over your system. Even menial things such as choice of system logger and cron daemon can be chosen and configured exactly the way you want. In other distributions, this is not possible from the beginning - if at all possible as easily as in Gentoo.

Secondly, by building Gentoo from an extremely minimal base system (Gentoo is about as close as you can get to Linux from scratch, without being Linux from scratch) you get a system that only has what you need. Other distributions simply cannot provide this amount of flexibility, because they have to produce a distribution for the lowest common denominator. But with Gentoo, you decide what goes in, and what stays out.

But enough about installation; the actual usage is where Gentoo really shines. And perhaps one of Gentoo’s greatest hallmarks is in its package management system: enter, Portage.

Portage is a brilliant package manager. Of all that I have used, it has still remained my favourite. A close second would have to be Arch’s Pacman, but it differs greatly in the way that Pacman predominantly handles binary packages, while Gentoo follows the UNIX tradition of building from source. Source package management takes longer than binary package management, but once you learn the ins and outs of Portage, its advantages dramatically outweigh its disadvantages.

One such advantage is the configurability of USE flags. I use the Openbox window manager on my Gentoo installations, and therefore I don’t want to build support for KDE or GNOME in any of my packages; it’s a waste of time and space. With USE flags, I can disable such support without ruining functionality; I get a slimmer application with a shorter compile time, devoid of any extra inclusions I’ll never need.

This is a serious advantage over binary package management. Binary packages are not configurable like building from source is; they are set in stone with whatever support they were built with. This is because binary packages cannot be tailored to each individual user; once again, they must be built for the lowest common denominator to provide support for the majority of users. The trade off is a much faster installation (and a less suicidal CPU), but users of binary package management still install extra support for things they may never use. KDE users, for example, may be installing binary package built with GNOME support also, which of course they do not need.

Hence, source package management has some very distinct advantages over binary package management. In the end it all comes down to user preference, but Gentoo implements source package management exceptionally with Portage. It has flexibility and usability in perfect balance, logical syntax, and gives the Gentoo user the control he is used to.

Aside from package management, Gentoo also provides some fantastic tools for maintaining your system. ‘eselect’, for example, makes it easy to symlink your kernel, read the latest news on Portage and package updates, enable/disable fonts, and so on until your heart’s content. Gentoo also provides the ‘gentoolkit’ package in the repositories, which gives the user a number of tools for increasing the capabilities of Portage. The ‘revdep-rebuild’ function would have to be one such tool that I use frequently; it checks for any broken linkage on your system, and will list any missing dependencies it finds. This is especially useful after running ‘emerge -av —depclean’, where you might clean out some dependencies that you actually need.

When Gentoo is running, I find it is much lighter on the system’s resources. Logging into an Openbox session with Conky, xfce4-power-manager and wicd running, Gentoo uses a mere 67MiB of RAM. CPU usage, when idle, hovers around 0-1%. Bear in mind that my specs aren’t too fancy; I have 1.9GiB of RAM and a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo processor. Gentoo itself is running on the x86 architecture.

Finally, the control over your kernel configuration is a huge selling point. Having this much control may be daunting to new users, but all Gentoo users started somewhere; the point is, you only learn by experience.

Kernel compilation is not difficult; it is a matter of selecting what you want built into the kernel, such as ext4 support or your wireless driver, and then compiling and copying the image to your /boot/ directory. This means a Gentoo user’s kernel will generally be much slimmer and much less complicated than other distribution’s kernels. Gentoo kernels are built by the user for the user’s system, and so it only has what it needs - following with the Gentoo trend.

These are just some reasons why I still choose Gentoo, and as I said earlier, Gentoo has become my only choice when installing Linux. The supreme configurability, speed and power of this distribution makes it something that any serious Linux user cannot look past. While I listed my main reasons, there are many more, underlying advantages of Gentoo that are less obvious; to find these, you’ll have to discover them for yourself. For me, the Gentoo Linux distribution is still the greatest distribution in the Linux universe.