I recently heard someone say that people that use Arch Linux use it because they can't install Gentoo, and as someone who usually uses Arch I obviously felt super offended (not really), though it does seem like people who use Arch Linux like to mention it a lot.
Have I mentioned that I use Arch?
Jokes aside though, I gave Gentoo a try recently and it was quite a ride. I read up on the documentation a few months back and gave it a try again. It's actually quite straightforward and so I went ahead and got my hands on the latest *.iso and fired up virtual box.
That's about as far as I got. I followed the documentation up until I had to choose a profile.
Gentoo let's you choose different profiles to create an operating system that fits your needs. For example someone who wants to use KDE Plasma would choose the Plasma profile or someone who doesn't want any desktop would choose a profile that only includes the necessary.
I tried multiple profiles but none worked. The compile process failed always. Once I somehow got past the profile selection, but it only gets worse from there.
You'll have to compile the kernel shudders
Gentoo can either use a manually configured build or an automatically created one. The first time I went for the automatically created settings, which turned out to be a mistake. It'll include support for basically every device that was ever created. That combined with the fact that the virtual machine only had one CPU core resulted in me waiting for the process to finish over over six hours.
It ended with virtual box crashing and me calling it a day. The second attempt wasn't much better. I got stuck at the profile selection again, which returned errors and I then proceeded to delete the virtual machine.
So I guess that's my experience with Gentoo for now, fun ain't it?
I might leave defeated for now, but I'm ready to give it another shot sometime in the future.
If you want to experience the madness yourself why not head over to genntoo.org and try it out. Maybe you'll get further than I did.
Gentoo is a beast, I've been running it off and on for a while and it's pretty daunting. You have to get used to compiling kernel, especially if a new version comes out every so often. I'd get a spare computer and install gentoo to it, running in VirtualBox will work and there are some kernel .config people put out just to run gentoo as a guest in VirtualBox to make it a bit easier, but there's a distro called Redcore LInux that works out of the box with VirtualBox. Give that distro a try and see what you think.
www.redcorelinux.org
Mind posting those errors? Maybe we can be any of help?
Sorry that I'm answering just now. Thanks for your response but I quickly disposed of any evidence that pointed towards me trying Gentoo, so I don't have any errors anymore.
The issues occurred after executing this command:
emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse @worldwhich is right after chrooting into the installation. I think it failed at some qt stuff.
I watched some other people installing gentoo and they never even ran that command (at least up to the point I watched them) so I tried doing it that way and it failed again. It's quite upsetting that even when following the guide closely and using a virtual environment it's still so easy to run into issues.
I might get back to you though if I give this another shot.
Alright. Feel free to contact me :)