20 Years of Gentoo
It&#x27;s not you Gentoo, it&#x27;s me. I&#x27;m just not good enough.<p>I&#x27;ve been trying to like Gentoo for over four years, ever since I installed it on my primary laptop. I love the idea of having the fine-tuned control that Gentoo offers, and I love the idea that everything I install is tailored to my specific system.<p>But despite my best intentions I have not mastered it - in fact I barely feel like I understand it. When I remember to update it <i>a couple times a week</i> everything is pretty smooth. Go much longer than that and all bets are off. If I go on a long vacation I dread coming back to a Gentoo update. I just don&#x27;t have the discipline to keep up.<p>Lately portage has been scolding me because some random packages are trying to install different versions of openssl. I&#x27;ve been ignoring it for weeks while I muster the courage to solve it.<p>And in my experience this kind of problem is super common. Either I&#x27;m pulling multiple versions of a package into the same slot, or I&#x27;m trying to merge a masked package, or some package is trying to put files in a place it doesn&#x27;t own, or who knows...<p>Every time I try to solve one of these issues it&#x27;s like I&#x27;m starting from scratch. I read manpages, online docs, bug trackers. I try various incantations of emerge flags. And eventually I show up the IRC channel with my tail between my legs.<p>Fortunately, the IRC community is extremely knowledgeable and can usually fix my problem in no time. But I hate having to ask for help, and I never seem to get closer to solving them myself.<p>The other major issue I have is convenience: it sometimes takes <i>so long</i> to install a new package. I get it - that&#x27;s what you expect with a source-based distro. But man I did not understand just how much compiling time I&#x27;d need. Krita releases a new patch version? There&#x27;s a couple hours with my laptop fans blasting. My laptop has easily spent 10x or 50x the time compiling Krita vs actually running it! And that&#x27;s just one random program; god help you if you want Firefox on the same machine.<p>Anyway, on my next computer I&#x27;ll probably install Arch.