Gentoo Linux

What hackers pick instead

• UbuntuA mainstream Linux distro that mostly just works on lots of hardware, suits beginners and offers long LTS support, though critics dislike Snaps and Canonical's direction.560recommend
• DebianA community-run, free Linux distribution recommended for rock-solid stability, curated trustworthy package repositories and painless in-place upgrades; critics say stable packages are old and bug fixes rarely get backported.552recommend
• Fedora LinuxA mainstream, beginner-friendly Linux distro that mostly works out of the box and balances stability with current packages, though frequent release upgrades occasionally break things.437recommend
• Arch LinuxA rolling Linux distro praised for up-to-date, near-upstream packages, excellent wiki docs and installs that last for years, though updates can break things and much is manual.362recommend
• Linux MintA beginner-friendly Linux distro that feels familiar to Windows users, works out of the box with no ads or nagware, though major version upgrades and display quirks can be troublesome.277recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 272 comments. Each links to the original.

1. I've been using Gentoo for decades and (sadly) see no reason to switch. I strongly disrecommend Gentoo as a first Linux distro for most folks

   Mixed · Nov 2025

2. Gentoo was so awesome though but I had to switch to debian because I would just play with my configuration all the time and break things.

   Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package”

3. Not at all. I have even recovered from bricking the package manager (my fault, these days there are protections in place against that).

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package”

4. I learnt a hell of a lot with Gentoo - only had a dvd and the magazine it came with stepping through the stage 1 install process.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Linux from Scratch”

5. The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

6. Gentoo is what really made Linux click for me, too. I'm still very, very glad for that and remain a loyal user to this day!

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “14-year-old Miles Wu folded origami pattern that holds 10k times its own weight”

7. Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.

   Mixed · Feb 2026 · in “I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers”

8. One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock.

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

9. One guy could maintain their OS. No forced compiler flags, internal binhost, everything else same as what they had.

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “CERN Transitioning Computers To Debian After Being A Longtime RHEL Institution”

10. You can just drop a patch into a folder, and every time you re/install or upgrade a package, it'll get applied!

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

11. you can just drop the .patch file into an apropriate folder and it'll be applied with every re/install/upgrade

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Modifying FileZilla to Workaround Bambu 3D Printer's FTP Issue”

12. With portage all it takes is to have the patch sit in /etc/portage/patches. It doesn't get better than that.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

13. I did break stuff, especially Gentoo, a lot... but out of those I maybe got hit once by a kernel regression?

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Greg Kroah-Hartman Stretches Support Periods for Key Linux LTS Kernels”

14. consider use of Gentoo as your Linux distribution to force learning about building packages and command line

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: How would you set up a child’s first Linux computer?”

15. Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

16. In general stable has become _really_ stable, and unstable is still mostly usable without major hiccups.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

17. I think Gentoo is very stable, but you have to make use of revdep-rebuild and know what you are doing

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

18. I think is currently the best disto. Best customization, uptodate/stable packages, user package repo

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package”

19. Not "by default", but still Gentoo. My USE= is several lines worth of -this -that -all-the-things.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Copy Fail – CVE-2026-31431”

20. The main selling point is that you compile out any features you are not using, on a global level.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

21. Where you lose time is in trying to optimize your system and packages using the multiple switches

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

22. which unlike other distributions does not yet force the choices of the maintainers upon the users

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “I Hate: Programming Wayland Applications”

23. Arch (or even Gentoo) is great if you want to do more detailed customizations of various things.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Framework Sponsors CachyOS”

24. You get flexibility using USE flags to compile which component you want to include in a package.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “My way to remove "Linuxisms" from FreeBSD”

25. no more complex than an arch installation, but with a smaller community and less documentation

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

26. Gentoo has many smart people. ever since the rise of Arch, Gentoo lost a lot of grounds.

    Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

27. I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

28. The update must have included an ABI change. Not surprisingly, the machine did not come back up after a reboot.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Last rites for Gentoo's Chromium package”

29. With Gentoo, it had always been quite painful to deal with the layers of complexity pertaining to Gentoo itself

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Runit Linux: Complete Guide to Unix Init Scheme with Service Supervision”

30. Installation is a pain, initial configuration is a pain and there's always something more to tweak

    Criticizes · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

31. I have fond memories in the early 2000s of getting the first MacBook Pro's with Intel Core i7's and the first thing we did at my company was build and install gentoo.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “macOS 27 Beta Breaks the Ability to Boot Asahi Linux”

32. both of which had a level of quality comparable with FreeBSD and much superior to what the other Linux distributions provided at that time

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Why Gentoo?”

33. If he wanted to show people how to roll their own opinionated distro the way gentoo or lfs kinda did that’d be another too!

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “Omarchy: Any User Process Can Escalate to Root”

34. Gentoo is often at the forefront of identifying and helping resolve integration issues between different software projects

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Gentoo Linux 2025 Review”

35. LLMs have unlocked my ability to do so. Wrestling with Linux is no longer constantly Googling with no end in sight.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “General Resolution: LLM Usage in Debian”

36. The docs from both Gentoo and Arch, on the other hand, are much more complete and practical in explaining things

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Linux from Scratch”

37. Consider Gentoo as well? They have decent binary package availability now which reduces the compilation needed.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Replacing Systemd with OpenRC in Debian”

38. Actually on Linux when you have a problem, you can be pretty certain that someone competent can find a solution

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “PCs refuse to shut down after Microsoft patch”

39. Gentoo made a lot of sense WAY back in a pre-docker world, where you had to run the whole world on the host OS.

    Mixed · Oct 2026 · in “A plea not to use uv-build”

40. a source-based system like Gentoo is particularly nice is that you can compile your binaries with debug flags

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “We All Depend on Open Source. We Will Defend It Together”