The Start of a Rabbit Hole

So, after my Void Linux post a few months ago, God decided to punish me and give me the weirdest errors ever! That I have never experienced before!

To start, runit is pretty barebones. I know I used that as a “pro” in my post, but really, it’s just not enough for me. I’ve been looking at other init systems, and comparing runit to something like dinit, for me just makes dinit the obvious choice. I wanted at least some void features, while giving me the freedom to choose anything I want.

Gentoo Linux!

When I first discovered Gentoo Linux, I’ve been told it’s “the final boss of Linux” and that “you need to compile EVERYTHING!!”. So of course, I stayed away from Gentoo for a while.

Until, when I was chatting on Discord, a lot of people were talking about Gentoo. I decided, “hell, why not? seems like a fun challenge!”. And oh boy, did I make the best decision of my life.

Installing

My first install was… okay, I guess. I decided to be different, and use the LLVM + OpenRC profile (which, now I know that the LLVM profile is kinda unstable).

The install was easy, I just read the handbook carefully, rebooted, prayed a little, and it booted! I decided to go with Sway as my main desktop. Sway was… a bit of a pain to setup. For some reason, elogind was just not working at all. So I settled on seatd, which somehow worked perfectly first try!

Niri

>THIS IS HECKING OFTOPIC!! THIS IS A POST ABOUT GENTOO!!

Before I even installed Gentoo, I found out about what’s probably one of the best wayland compositors I’ve ever used…

Niri!

Niri is a scrolling-tiling wayland compositor. If you don’t know what “scrolling” means, it’s basically:

Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize.

Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never “overflow” onto an adjacent monitor.

Workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there’s always one empty workspace present all the way down.

The workspace arrangement is preserved across disconnecting and connecting monitors where it makes sense. When a monitor disconnects, its workspaces will move to another monitor, but upon reconnection they will move back to the original monitor.

Source: Niri GitHub

And I just love the workflow of it. It basically fixes all the flaws of normal tiling in my opinion, because I can actually have 2 fullscreen windows (hell, infinite windows even!) on a single workspace. Not to mention the amount of customizability it has. The eye-candy matches Hyprland!

If you ever have the chance, please try niri. It is genuinely one of the best wayland compositors I’ve EVER used and I don’t plan on switching to another workflow.

Back to Gentoo

Well, after using Gentoo for about 6-7 months by now, here’s my opinion:

It fucking rocks! It honestly became my new favorite distro. I doubted it at first, but everything is so good, so good in fact I have to separate each Gentoo component I liked in their OWN header!

Portage

Portage is the Gentoo Package Manager. I absolutely love it! It basically forces you to have a clean system or else your system will just kill himself lol.

Jokes aside, Portage is really good. USEflags are amazing. You’re telling me I DECIDE what components I want and don’t want in my system? Not to mention how much customization options there is on Portage. It’s quite fun to test out CFLAGS to see what’s best for you.

The /etc/portage layout is also amazing for me:

• You can make a package.env, to change your make.conf to a specific package, if there’s any compilation errors
• You can make a package.license, and live the true RMS life by only using GPL software
• You can make a package.accept_keywords, to decide if you wanna gamble your system to install a testing package
• Want gentoo-kernel to be on 6.15? Just unmask it!
• Or you can be risky and set “~amd64” to your entire system (this is NOT recommended)

I just love how many options they give us to just… mess around with our system.

Wiki

Gentoo has a really good wiki. Unlike Arch’s wiki, I feel like Gentoo’s wiki explains things way more clearly.

The Arch wiki is like “yeah install this packages here’s some config options and fuck you”, and the Gentoo wiki is like “yeah here’s some of the useflags this package has, here’s an example configuration of the said package, here’s some troubleshooting steps…”.

Both wikis are great, don’t get me wrong, I just prefer Gentoo’s one lol. I even contributed to the Gentoo wiki!

Conclusion

I really like Gentoo. Better than Void, even. It’s (probably) the BEST distro of all time. I like the community, I just like everything.

There’s not really much to say here at the end, but yeah, try Gentoo one day!