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My journey to become a Gentoo fan - Marián Mižik
2020-06-13 | 7 minutes reading | tags: Gentoo, Linux, Personal
I started working with linux 17 years ago (in 2003). It was Debian Woody. Kernel version was 2.4.x and everybody was talking about making the big step to 2.6. Linux of that era was complete disaster when it comes to UX, or working "out of the box", but for me it was fun and I also liked that "underground" feeling about it. I didn't understand most of the underlying things, and to be honest, every time I got sick of it, or I wanted to play some games, I just rebooted to Windows XP :)
So there I was, hopping regularly between two systems based on my actual mood and laziness. One day I was sitting on my dorm room balcony together with my room mate. Both of us were volunteering in our university network administration club. I was a web master, room mate was system administrator. He was very eager about that distro he heard of, which does not have any automated installation and you had to locally compile whole system by yourself from scratch, optimised for your cpu architecture, cpu features and custom needs. You could choose between 3 types of initial library collections called stage1, stage2, or stage3, where stage3 was almost complete minimal system and stage1 was almost only a compiler with necessary dependencies to start with. You would have to unpack it, chroot into it and start building your system from ground zero. I was thinking about making the effort to completely move to Linux and this distro sounded intriguing. I didn't know what chroot was, but I got a gap between two semesters and plenty of time as I only got a part time job as a Java programmer. So we shook hands, opened some beers and the mission started right in that moment. I formatted my main drive and smashed my Windows installation CD in half. Ready to begin journey to became pure linux user, to get everything what I needed (and before had only on Windows), installed, configured and running on Linux. I knew it would take many hours to accomplish, but boy! If someone would told me, that the only thing I would have after 40 hours of almost straight work would be successfull boot to TTY, I probably wouldn't take that rocky path.
It took me 9 days of 12+ hours to get most of the stuff ready, but during that week, I absorbed such a huge amount of linux knowledge, that I felt like a Neo from The Matrix. I had super small and optimized kernel compiled with no modules. I got TTY with high resolution and framebuffer. I got optimized and very quick system running with much smaller memory footprint. I learned what was that chroot, and also about init, runlevels, process priorities, I fall in love with portage, overlays, ebuilds, use flags and all the main gentoo concepts. I found out, that I can choose my own init system, cron scheduler, system logger, boot loader, kernel patches. I finally achieved to make an installation where KDE (Qt) a Gnome (Gtk) libraries were not messed up together because of random software dependencies. I knew what software I had in my system and why. I could finally read ps aux and understand most of the lines and I could check what ports are opened and knew the reason for it. First time in my life I was master of my operating system and it felt great.
Nowadays, I can install gento in 3-4 hours. Official Gentoo documentation now tell you to start with stage3 to spare you the agony of trying to grow your system from stage1. (AFAIK it is even not available anymore). My machine is able to compile kernel under 1 minute, which is a huge blast. Imagine waiting for almost 1 hour after every kernel config change, then reboot to only get kernel panic during the startup :) In other words, it is much easier these days to go with gentoo, but the benefits are the same as they were in the past. Last time I checked, the official installations documentation was still superb and up to date.
Since then I had to use many other distros because of school or work and I found out, that even when I had the knowledge how things should work, some distros were fighting against me. It looked like the more user friendly linux distro tries to be, the more it is fighting the power user when he wants to do something manually, or in a custom way. But not on Gentoo's watch. Over more than 12 years, every time I didn't like something, gentoo gave me an elegant way to accomplish the change I was about to make. I wanted plain old simple init system, and it never forced me to use systemd. I hated the instability of pulseaudio in its early versions and gentoo until this day gives me the ability to run on plain alsa. If I had issues with new HW and needed bleeding edge kernel, piece of cake in gentoo. You need different version of some software in the repo? Most of the time you will only pinpoint the preferred version in your portage config file and run install. Want to migrate your system from openssl to libressl because of security? Just change the use flag and rebuild affected packages. I tried other advanced "do it yourself" distros like Slackware or Arch, but for me personally, Gentoo is the one. Especially in current times, when recompiling something is not matter of minutes, but rather seconds.
By the way, that 2 weeks without all the luxury of a graphical user interface gave me one more great experience. I learned how to use terminal alternatives of GUI applications. I had to use lynx for browsing, finch for IM, midnight commander for file management, vim for editing, htop for process maintenance, mutt for mails and so on, because I wasn't able to run X for quite some time :D Funny thing is, that after I got the GUI back, I found out, that in many cases I am faster and more satisfied with TUI solutions than the GUI ones and I am using them until now, but that is completely different story to write about...
2023 Marian Mizik | License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | marian at mizik dot sk | marian_mizik@bsd.network (mastodon)