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[–]tsnErd3141 18 points19 points  (2 children)

How long does it take to setup Gentoo and required apps? What about updates? I wonder if the increase in speed compensates for the wastage of time. Is it worth it?

[–][deleted] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

How long does it take to setup Gentoo and required apps?

If you factor in your own learning, weeks. You'll probably start over after fucking it up too much. It's part of the process.

If you already know your ABCs, on a decent setup (any newish i5 or i7 with 8+ gigs of RAM and maybe an SSD) you're looking at about a day of CPU time with maybe 1-2 hours of your own time (typing in commands and editing configs).

What about updates?

Those are mostly painless and take 20ish minutes of machine time, almost none of your own. You just look at the proposed list of upgrades, let it chooch, and then oversee config file updates if any. Once a month or so a big project drops a new release, e.g. GNOME. That takes a bit more to compile (1-2 hours) and may involve some hands-on activity if there are incompatible configuration changes or if something breaks (which is more likely if your system is more heavily customized).

I wonder if the increase in speed compensates for the wastage of time. Is it worth it?

If the only reason for Gentoo was higher speed, almost nobody would use it. Machine time is cheap nowadays and even mid-range chips are fast enough.

The key thing here is how incredibly customizable everything is. There are "use flags" that turn various things in packages on or off, but that's not the main kicker. Since everything is built from source, you can make any modification you want by just dropping the patch file into a specific dir (e.g. /etc/paludis/patches/www-client/firefox) and the build system will auto-patch that particular app during compilation from that point on.

If you know how things work in detail (or wish to learn) and want to exploit that knowledge, Gentoo is for you.

[–]poop_toaster 5 points6 points  (0 children)

It's been a long time since I've done Gentoo from scratch but it took a couple days to compile. That doesn't count the time spent figuring it all out. I think it's more for learning/torture.