Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.
I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.
These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.
Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.
Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.