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?
I use it. Mostly just love of the game. Occasionally I’ve played with custom kernel patches and custom patches to software packages, and Gentoo makes that super easy. Building software that doesn’t have a package is also pretty comparatively easy.
There’s a lot more configurability than even arch; if you’re careful it’s not too hard to get your base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range). It doesn’t force you to use any particular init system, if that matters to you. Even some individual applications can be smaller/a bit more efficient if you compile without features you don’t need. You can also keep things super up to date, run the latest kernel etc. Supposedly the Google Chromebook os is originally based on Gentoo because of the degree of configurability.
Most of those things don’t really matter, and aren’t truely unique to Gentoo, but if you were really only concerned about practicality you’d just run Fedora or Debian.
There are also a few use cases like cross building to weird hardware that other distros don’t have builds for where Gentoo can be a bit easier than LFS. Doing weird stuff like using musl instead of glibc is also possible. I haven’t heard of that on another distro (although I haven’t looked in a while).
It’s not that much harder than Arch was back in the day, which was never really that hard if you were willing to actually read the manual.
A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.
Yeah, for sure. It’s not really unique to Gentoo, you theoretically can do it in any distro, some are easier, some are harder. Gentoo is one of the easier distros to keep minimal in my opinion.