I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
I’ve been using Linux Mint since forever. I’ve never felt a reason to change. But I’m interested in what persuaded others to move.
Gentoo: I hated constantly compiling and configuring. It was incredibly time consuming. If I was compiling for uncommon cases it might make sense, but I am dealing with a pretty standard dev machine.
NixOS: The configuration is kind of a pain and never really got the extra features you get beyond package management working correctly.
I refuse to believe there are people who use Gentoo seriously. There is no possible way it’s not just a joke about how goofy a true stallman-esque approach to FOSS is.
I used it on an old potato chip of a Pentium 4 (this was nearly 20 years ago). It took days to compile what I wanted, which was a basic system plus KDE. I don’t know what was going through my 17 year old brain. But hey, it walked me through some details of a Linux system that I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Now I would recommend Linux From Scratch for learning and a nice, stable distro with a large, supportive community for a daily driver.
I’ll give you one reason for using Gentoo: option of no systemd.
Gentoo is one of the few distros which still offer a systemdless setup given its nature of high configurability. You can tell the system-wide config file to exclude systemd support in every package it attemps to compile.
I hope you or anyone who just enjoys their linux machine running fine and happily, now be able to see what freedom can mean in the open source universe. Cheers.