YJL

Two weeks ago, April 16 marked the 5th milestone, the fifth anniversary of me using Gentoo Linux. It’s been a long time, 5 years ain’t a short time, not to mention I am really happy with the experience with Gentoo through all these years.

I’ve been debating with myself, whether if I should write about the five years of using. Many times, I decided not to, because I really didn’t have much to say about after the anniversary post I wrote 2 years ago. As you could guess, this blog post telling you that my final decision was a writing a short diff about the changes for the last couple of years.

Gentoo Liux is stable, although it might not be so if you don’t maintain your system properly. In these years, the worst issue I had ever encountered was unable to get into X. Interesting enough, switching to no-multilib, updating udev (1, 2), GRUB going from Legacy to GRUB2, none of them got me an unbootable system, network always working, disk always got to be mounted correctly.

In other words, Gentoo is stable for me. If you pay a little attention to read what message it spits out, I really don’t think you have high chance to be doomed. Since I first used Gentoo, I have only installed it once, that means I have never re-installed it. There are more than one distributions, although upgrading is possible, but sometimes, re-installation is also recommended.

Little more than 3 years ago, I finally established a procedure of updating my system, something I called Weekly Update Process. I still followed it, but a couple of things has changed since then:

1. Portage 2.2 was stabilized since September, 2013, many new features were added. One was revdep-build isn’t needed anymore, using @preserved-build set, instead.
2. My update interval is now extending to 30-day, although I have yet to reach that. Quite often, there was a security bulletin to prompt me synchronizing and updating related packages before 30-day.

Nevertheless, I could clearly say that even weekly is still too often for maintaining Gentoo. 30 days are really fine, I have not yet had any problems on updating. You could certainly update as often as you like, even daily, but you are just wasting your time, bandwidth, and processing power. A bigger list of updating packages might look scary, but you just need to take time to read through, and prioritize some first if really necessary.

The red Gentoo logo by Gentoo Foundation, Inc.

I believe this is all I could say about Gentoo after five years of usage. If you are looking for a new Linux distribution, even you are new to GNU/Linux, give Gentoo a try. As long as you are willing to learn, Gentoo wouldn’t disappoint you because it’s unique and none other is ever like it.