Installing Gentoo Linux

Date: 31-08-2024

Over the past three days I have been installing and tinkering with Gentoo Linux!

Installing

I found the Gentoo Handbook extremely useful for installing Gentoo Linux. In the past, my attempts to install Gentoo on my test PC, which uses a BIOS system, were, just a big fail due to a bunch of small mistakes I made. But this time around I installed Gentoo on my main PC, which has 18 cores, that allows me to compile things faster. Overall, I found the installation process to be very straightforward. I simply SSHed into the computer and copied the necessary commands to install the required packages, along with some miscellaneous things like ensuring the file systems where 100% working.

NVIDIA

After installing I wanted to get my desktop enviroment of DWM working. Now sadly I do have a NVIDIA Gpu and I knew before I even started installing Gentoo that I would have problems with it. So I tried the simple solution first just installing the Xorg server software and the NVIDA graphics drivers. It did not work so I did some more tinkering and updated my system with a configured kernel but I sent it into a panic. At this point I just lost all hope and I had been using Gentoo for two days at that point and I just wanted a normal desktop so I reinstalled Arch Linux and played some video games because I was just tired at that point.

Final thoughts

I really enjoyed messing around with Gentoo, even though it took a long time to do so. The documentation on their website was excellent, and I highly recommend trying it out if you're looking for a faster operating system. Personally, I plan to switch to Gentoo once I get an AMD GPU since AMD is supported way better on Linux.

My favorite thing about Gentoo is that it doesn’t require Systemd as your init system. Instead, Gentoo gives you the choice to use OpenRC, which I find to be simpler and more efficient and not to add more clean than Systemd. I also love that Gentoo requires you to compile everything, and I noticed that my system ran way faster compared to when I was using Arch Linux or any other Linux distro.

But that is all, thank you for reading!

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