Gentoo seems great if you want to experiment with patches to major programs or system libraries. That’s what I used it for.

If you are looking for a good OS for privacy I would recommend Qubes OS, it completely blows away pretty much everything else besides tails. Gentoo is not exactly the most private of operating systems apart from the usual linux privacy.

No, but it is fun too use 🙃

Why would you use Gentoo for criminal activity over any other operating system including Windows and Mac?

If you want to keep your installation and save a little bit of time updating it then use the binary repo.

https://www.funtoo.org/Welcome

instead of Gentoo.

Gentoo is more about the fun of building a Linux distro that is perfectly tailored to your hardware and personal preferences. Sometimes you’ll see a performance increase of 0.01%, sometimes 25%+. Just depends on a lot of different things.

The build times are really only a consideration on first or second install of the OS. And even with your first install, you’ll probably want to start with the pre-built options, and then gradually move away from that to compiling more and more of your own system.

There are a couple apps like Firefox that also have a pre-compiled binaries available for Gentoo, so no waiting there. Of course, there’s also Flatpak for desktop-based apps.

Otherwise, you just compile what you want, when you want. And you can tell Portage how much in terms of cores/threads/resources it gets to use when compiling, so that it can just run in the background while you’re doing your normal thing (or scheduled for when You’re not using your machine).

Portage is also a phenomenal package manager, and can track and satisfy all dependencies for you as-needed. You can also specify what elements of your system to keep on stable, vs testing, etc. It’s not like Slackware.

Gentoo is what was used to build Android, along with many other distros. It’s as complex/simple, secure/insecure, private/un-private, latest-and-greatest/LTS as you tell it to be. You can choose to update things continuously in the background, or just once a week overnight, or on any other schedule that you want.

You’ll probably learn some new things in the course of installing it, but follow the handbook to the letter, avail yourself of the community, and be patient to start with. It works for me, and I like it, but there are plenty of great pre-cooked distros that are also great. I’m just a tinkerer by nature, and enjoy getting increasingly more out of my machines over time.

that depends. are you now or have you ever been a femboy?

or is it a really good OS for privacy that sacrifices in usability?

Privacy and usability are inversely correlated. Anyone who tells you otherwise either has a relatively weak definition of “privacy” or a relatively exotic definition of “usable”. If you’re at the point of installing an OS like Gentoo just for its privacy benefits alone, I’d say you’re already the latter case, even from the perspective of most fellow Linux users.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily imply very un-private software is always very usable, or that highly privacy-respecting tools with good UX don’t exist. Just that most highly UX-polished software tends to have poor privacy, and most privacy-focused software expects the user to do a lot of hoop-jumping to make up for all the systems and workflows the user can’t utilize due to having some dealbreaking non-privacy-respecting component to them.

I used to use it 20 years ago. It’s not worth it.

In fact, benchmarks showed it was ultimately slower than some other distro’s at the time (and far less productive).

I used it because I thought I’d optimise it specifically for my system. Turns out, there are more important factors than recompiling for your CPU

The package manager portage is simply the most flexible one I have ever used, especially with the new binary repositories; it beats deb and dnf/rpm by far in my opinion.

Ommiting features of installed software with the help of useflags can make it more stable and secure.

I think it is “criminal” not wanting to use Gentoo as a daily driver. But this is just me and my opinion doing only honest stuff with it. (:

Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.

You have a relatively weak CPU for Gentoo – there is no denying that. The upside of Gentoo is that you can make it exactly how you want it, it will be truly tuned by you for you unlike anything else. I ran it myself for a while. And if you want security, if you have the time to really understand the hardening options Gentoo can be more secure than anything else. As I said, how good Gentoo works and what it can do is a direct function of the user.

If you want fastness, consider using void linux instead

Gentoo can be good if you desire some very weird or exotic configurations or just want more granular customisability that binary DIY distros don’t offer. The way it’s built allows that in a way that makes it easier there. If you don’t really need that and aren’t a fan of the build times, it won’t hurt going for something like Void or Arch which are also DIY distros but all-binary so you don’t need to worry. (unless you use xbps-src or the AUR).

afaik, the “main gimmick” of gentoo is to have a distro that is 100% optimized for your PC. That aside, I don’t see a point installing it unless your PC is centuries old and really need the extra speed boost.