 For those of you who were around last Sunday for the stream, you'll know that that I installed gentoo now the first thing I should say about my week with gentoo is that I'm very appreciative for all of my patrons who got me to the goal Which is the reason why I installed gentoo in the first place, especially Robert I mean especially everybody but Robert paid like over two hundred dollars to get me to that goal. So everybody Thank you Supporting me so the next thing I should say is that I'm still on gentoo Like I still have my gentoo install and I can actually show you my gentoo install Right here. This is my gentoo install ignore the lack of a wallpaper. It won't stay like I can't get My I can't get fed to keep the wallpaper to stay after reboot. I don't know why It's weird things are going on. Just trust me on that. So this is my gentoo install and You'll notice that I'm on DWM and not i3 which is an interesting story Which I'm going to tell here in a few minutes, but I've used gentoo now Every day for the last week for several hours. Now. I have not lived in it full-time simply because I had to get work done and Until gentoo gets to a certain point You really can't do any work with it and I didn't have enough time to just sit down For hours and hours on end to get everything working a week later I think I'm finally to the point where I could use gentoo full-time if I wanted to there are a few things here that are Not working correctly yet But I'll talk about those here in a few minutes, but I'm at the point now a Week later where this is a fully Functional system it has all my stuff on it all my scripts are in the right place everything The like the main stuff that I absolutely have to have is working So I have some thoughts about gentoo the first thing I should talk about is the overall experience Now for those of you who have never used gentoo before or have never been successful installing gentoo before What makes gentoo interesting is that it's a source-based distro And what I mean by that is that everything you install has to be compiled by you There are hardly any Binaries that you install now that's not completely true because there are binaries that you can use things like the Firefox binary the kernel binary stuff like that So you don't have to compile your own kernel or compile Firefox or whatever But for the most part if you install something you're gonna compile it. So for example, I installed Ranger I had to compile it. I needed the ubersug in order to get image previews. I had to compile it I use exa for my LS alias here. I had to compile it. Oh And over and over and over again, that's what gentoo is now if that sounds exhausting to you Then you're not alone, but you're probably wondering then what is the benefit of actually doing this and The benefit it actually is pretty neat it by compiling everything from source by building everything yourself It allows you to Find tune exactly how things are compiled So for example things like pycom can be compiled without the sync support if you wanted to I don't know why you'd want to do that But you could do that you could compile OBS without and bank support if you wanted to there's a ton of different options for every program that you download They're called use flags and you can say for instance Tell the system that you never want to see pipe wire ever like you never want Any package to install pipe wire as a dependency or anything like that you can do that and it ensures that pipe wires never touches your system That's amazing. That is a really neat and very Attractive reason to use gentoo and I'm gonna miss it when I use arch again So I'm just gonna put that out there. That's gonna be one of the reason things I miss When I move back to arch or arco outside of the compiling things from source Really the biggest thing about gentoo is that it's very much like arch actually and that you build Everything together yourself every little piece every little dependency is something that you have to put in there and that's the reason why it's taken me a whole week to get the System up to the point where it's actually usable. There are so many little itsy-bitsy pieces that go into The ability to use like DWM or I3 you that it just takes a while to get there And you can be using your computer for a little while and then realize oh I need this thing So I have to go run off and compile this thing And then you'll use your computer for a little while longer And you'll realize that there's another dependency that you haven't installed yet And you have to run and install that one and while on arch That's not a big deal Usually it's just pseudo pac-man dash s whatever and it takes five seconds to install on gentoo It's a little bit different now for the most part the horror stories That you hear about four or five days of compiling stuff Most of that at least in my experience is complete nonsense the longest compile Session that I had was with Crusader and that's a KDE application So I had a ton of dependencies and that took about 25 minutes now. I have really high-end hardware So obviously if you are running this on a laptop or something where you don't have 64 gigabytes of RAM in a Ryzen 3800x your compile times you're obviously going to be a lot slower But from my experience the compile times weren't So bad that it would have that it proved annoying But the problem is is that it's still over time as you install a whole bunch of stuff that compile time does add up And that means everything takes just a little bit longer to install to update Whatever it just takes a little bit longer And honestly, there's nothing hugely wrong with that for me personally I didn't find it that egregious that things took a little bit longer I just went and did something else while I was waiting for something to emerge. So let me talk about the good things So I talked a little bit about the ability to use use flags and to compile software and packages Without or with certain features. That's the number one reason that I like gentoo. It's actually really cool There are other reasons that I like gentoo the biggest one being I Absolutely have adored my time here because I've learned So much if you are interested in learning a lot about Linux But you're not quite interested in going crazy and installing Linux from scratch gentoo is a fantastic option for you because it is Very complex, but at the same time easy to learn if I can say that you can do a ton of stuff here and get a ton of information and Just learn a lot now one thing is for sure though is I would not do this alone Like I have had a lot of help Ben from my discord server has been there and Zany's discord server Tyler's been there to help Josh has been there to help and Without those three guys, I wouldn't have actually been able to even install gentoo on my own At least without a whole bunch of trial and error So I'm a very appreciative of having help so I highly recommend if you're going to try gentoo find someone that knows what they What they're doing and ask them for help, but even beyond the help thing I've learned a lot like there's just a ton of stuff here that I've learned to do and it's been a very rewarding experience I've been able to create a system basically from the ground up that I'm proud of I can come here I can do actual work. I'm recording this video right now I'm gentoo if I could get my i3 configuration file to work. I was going to do a stream tonight from gentoo We're gonna talk about the problems here just a minute But the point is is that this is a fully functioning system and I did it, right? I had help but I'm very proud of the fact that I'm here like I have all my configuration files here I have all my junk here and it works like I could right now Minus a few things that are really pissing me off use this system for the next month and be perfectly happy And in fact, I've considered doing it But let's go ahead and transition into the negative things the first thing That pisses me off right now is that I can't get pycom to work very well So if you are familiar with pycom at all, you'll know That one of the features of it will allow you to run it with a V-sync flag that will will take Some of the screen tearing off from your system for whatever reason this computer here screen tears like a mofo It's just a horrible thing with this combination of hardware That it just does it and it doesn't matter what Linux distribution it is like they all do it It doesn't matter like as usually the only place I know it is when I'm scrolling through like a webpage the screen tears and it drives me absolutely bonkers I can't put up with it. It just ruins my my day it ruins my day so Usually I can use pycom to get rid of it and When I can't use just pack on to get rid of it all of it like sometimes it just takes off like the top 90% of the screen tearing and you could still notice it somewhat There's a trick that somebody in the the comments is going to point to where you where you create a File in dot a slash Etsy slash X 11 slash Xorg.com dot D or something like that. I've done that and I still have screen tearing So that's my number one complaint right now is screen tearing I can't get rid of it no matter what I do and I've tried like I said, I've tried the two tricks that you're supposed to use in order to get rid of it And neither one of them work. I had a hell of a time actually getting pike on to actually start And that turned out to be my problem because I compiled it without any use flags and If you don't compile it with use flags, you can't use the v-sync flag and I was using the v-sync flag So it was just it was booked once I got it recompiled with a v-sync flag and started it in the X profile directory instead of my Auto start file for DWM It worked fine, but the screen staring was still there. So Honestly, that's my biggest problem right now. If I could get rid of the screen tearing I'd probably stay right on gentoo for a while and do a long-term review of it, but I can't stand the screen tearing it bugs me like Seriously just pisses me off. I can't get rid of it the other negative thing I have to say about gentoo is that it is complex like it is really Complex and there is just a ton of stuff here for you to learn the biggest problem I've had over the last week is learning emerge emerge has a literal shit ton of options and none of them are intuitive and It's not that this is not an emerge problem Pac-Man has the exact same problem Like how does Pac-Man dash s capital s equals equal install s? Like s doesn't mean install in any way which as far as I understand It doesn't make any sense to emerge is the same way if you don't learn some of the flags you're kind of going to be very confused very fast very often and Even now a week later. I'm still getting the whole a hold of what? Flags you need to use to do things like install stuff like update the system like a mask Packages and all this stuff. It's one thing right after another and it's all stuff You have to learn in order to use the system It's not necessarily a bad thing because I like learning that stuff, but I can see How it could be very overwhelming and very frustrating for a lot of people because it was very overwhelming and very frustrating for me Now there are apparently street sheets out there where you can see it all this stuff in like a very glanceable way I did not get a chance to take a look at those You know extensively over the last couple days But that's something that I would definitely check out if I do if I was going to stay on Gentoo, but I would just say That if you are deciding to try Gentoo, I highly recommend Taking notes. It's one thing that I really regret not doing is when the the fellows were helping me install this stuff I really wish I had had a notebook here in front of me and I wrote down Specifically the stuff about merge that I should have known like Specifically like the unmasking of packages like I've finally gotten it down after a week But there are certain parts of that process That I've had to look up probably ten times and it's just annoying now If you don't know what unmasking of packages, don't worry about it. It doesn't really matter It's just a gentoo thing. The point is is that sometimes you have to do this in order to install or order to install stuff and The process is something that has to be done in a certain order if they can miss if you miss a step It doesn't work So I've had to look that up several times And so I highly recommend as you go through and install this stuff Take notes, especially on the merge stuff. You'll be happy that you did so gentoo Honestly, it has been a really good experience. I've been highly impressed with what I've seen of it so far Now I can't say anything about gaming I don't have steam installed and I don't know whether or not I'm gonna make it that far or not I also can't say anything about being able to stream on here because I haven't actually been able to stream on gentoo yet So I don't know whether or not that will work. I will say this the Documentation for gentoo is fantastic If you had to put the arch wiki and the gentoo wiki side by side and ask which one's better I wouldn't be able to tell you they're both Really good. I would say that they're both technological in pros and By that I mean if you don't know what some of the words mean you're gonna have a problem So if you don't have an underlying idea of what you're doing You're probably going to get confused And if you're like me when you get confused reading something like that you kind of zone out or start skipping stuff And that's not a good thing I can in arch you can kind of get away with it some in sometimes because you can always go backwards during the install of Gentoo if you don't do things in order Your gentoo install is not gonna work. So don't be like me in that in that scenario So the final question that has to be asked is Will gentoo stay on my system? the answer to that question is Probably not and there are multiple reasons for it first I do have to do a long-term review coming up and I need this hard drive in order to do it So that's the biggest reason why the second reason is also equally big and that's the screen tearing if I could get rid of screen tearing Honestly, I wouldn't mind keeping gentoo run for a little while and actually making this the next long-term review But without being able to get rid of that I Can't do it like I just can't use something that screen tears that bad One of the things that I do primarily on my computer is read stuff Like half the time I do work like my actual job. I'm reading Thousands and thousands of words and either Google Docs or some other program or something And if the screen tears while I'm doing that and I notice it it takes me out of what I'm ever I'm doing for Multiple seconds maybe up to a half a half a minute where I'm raging in my head like why is this doing that and Well might not bother other people it bothers me so much that I can't get work done Therefore, I can't use gentoo. That's just kind of the way it is So if in the next couple days I can fix that screen tearing perhaps gentoo is the next long-term review If I can't fix it in the next couple days Probably gentoo is going to get overwritten with slack wear because that was the next long-term review plan That's what I was planning on doing next so We'll see how that goes. Would I recommend gentoo for other people? Hell, yeah I actually would if you are interested in Linux and you know what you're doing like if you know What Linux is how the file structure works and all that stuff, especially if you've installed arch Linux before Installing gentoo isn't that much more complicated than arch Linux. It's really not I would recommend doing it on a computer that has certain specs a lot of memory a fairly Component processor so that you're not there forever because if you're on really low-end like 10 year old hardware It's gonna take you too long and you're just gonna get frustrated and you're also probably going to burn your house down because your laptop or whatever is going to get really hot and It's just not gonna be a very good experience So do it on something modern and you'll have a good time and you'll learn a lot Even if you don't stick with gentoo you'll learn a lot along the way And so I would recommend anybody who's interested in becoming like a Linux die-hard Give this a try. It's actually not that bad So that is it for this video if you have comments about this experience. You can leave those comments in the comment section below I'm sure that there's something else that I was gonna talk about that. I've just completely forgotten because I didn't take any notes For this video is just kind of more of a ramble But I will leave those in the comment section below if I if I come up with something else that I've forgotten I'll leave those down below as well So if you want to you can follow me on Twitter at the next cast you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the next cast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank the current patrons Robert Sid, Devon, Patrick, Fred, Kramer, Megwin, Jackson, Evan, Tool, Steve, Ace, Everett, Linux, Garrett, Samuel, Mitchell, ArtCenter, J-Dog, CarbonData, Jeremy, Sean, Odin, Martin, Andy, Ross, Merrick, Camp, Joshua, Peter, Ray, Crucible, Dark Bennett, Sage, Primus, and PM Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time