New Gentoo LiveDVD Released, Powered By Linux 4.5 & Supports ZFS

[rip_her_apart]

Gentoo is the fastest underwater-swimming penguin in the world.

[bobwya]

Great news!! If you enjoy tinkering about and packaging flexibility then Gentoo has it in spades - the reason I run it as my main desktop OS. Definitely it's not for everyone - and it's a very impractical distro for general desktop use - as you can get seriously stuck from time to time... Very good at allowing one to achieve true zen-like patience

[starshipeleven]

Hell, it still does not even have a CLI installer, even Arch has an (unofficial) CLI installer + (unofficial) GUI installers now.

[k1e0x]

This is cool. Before you could get ZFS support with the sysrescue CD (based on Funtoo) but I supose it's nice to see it in distro. I have kinda a love hate relationship with Gentoo it's good for desktops though and it installs every kind of dependancy you could ever want for rolling your own software. Why Gentoo vs Arch? Well.. Arch is a binary distro so it's a lot harder to mess with compile time settings so adding or removing features from packages is harder (if even possible) on Arch. For instance if you want Gnome without Tracker or Native Language Support, or god knows what else you can do that on Gentoo.

[WorBlux]

Great news!! If you enjoy tinkering about and packaging flexibility then Gentoo has it in spades - the reason I run it as my main desktop OS. Definitely it's not for everyone - and it's a very impractical distro for general desktop use - as you can get seriously stuck from time to time... Very good at allowing one to achieve true zen-like patience

As a daily gentoo desktop user, I'll agree It's not a very practical distro for desktop use, but it is fairly practical for learning how linux is put together, compilation matched for closely to hardware, and as a bit of an expirimental system. You also pay the price for it being a rolling release with smaller issues spread out over time instead of dealing with upgrade WTF. It also lets you pull "packages" directly from upstream git or CVS repositories, which I have written a couple of personal-use ebuilds for a a few thing that were too new or too weird for mainstream distros to pick up.

[bobwya]

As a daily gentoo desktop user, I'll agree It's not a very practical distro for desktop use, but it is fairly practical for learning how linux is put together, compilation matched for closely to hardware, and as a bit of an expirimental system. You also pay the price for it being a rolling release with smaller issues spread out over time instead of dealing with upgrade WTF. It also lets you pull "packages" directly from upstream git or CVS repositories, which I have written a couple of personal-use ebuilds for a a few thing that were too new or too weird for mainstream distros to pick up.

I started writing one of my long winded replies about how Gentoo has one the lowest barriers you entry of any distribution for submitting community packages. The Overlay system is great - like the AUR system on steroids.
Portage is an amazing package manager - probably the most advanced of any Linux distribution.
The ebuild syntax is a lot easier to grock for new users than say build scripts for rpm and deb packages IMHO.
There's clearly a reason why users, like meweather, the storm of the switch to Plasma 5 or even just the faulting first steps with a broken Xorg setup! 😂

Also, Gentoo users tend to provide the most articulate and detailed test submissions on Wine HQ - in my experience 😉

[rip_her_apart]

Gentoo on a dailyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy yyyyyyyyyy basiiiiiiiiiisssssssssss babyyyyyyyyyyyy penguiiiiiinn powaaaaaaRRR.

No, seriously! For gentoo-penguins (like me) every other distro seems like a piece of cake since you do not have much to configure. "Mainstream" distro-users do not even care about kernel configuration

[k1e0x]

.....

[Fanboy80]

Gentoo is a real beauty and will become your best friend if you treat it right. But if you don't give it the attention it wants and you don't give it the necessary resources it will become a mean psycho bitch that will take all your inodes with it's ebuilds after it consumed all your CPU time. Then it will just leave you with nothing.

[Calchan]

it appeared to languish and found itself becoming much less relevant for various reasons

Perhaps it appears so to you but it couldn't be less true. Besides Google and their millions of ChromeOS machines, we know NASDAQ uses Gentoo; that Gaikai, which powers Playstation Now for Sony, has hundreds of servers running Gentoo, with them acknowledging that nothing else could do the job; etc... It's not because you don't see it that it doesn't exist. However, I agree that a lot of vocal users of a very specific type have moved along and that's probably for the best.

rather difficult to maintain and upgrade without breaking stuff.

But sure, if you have the means to wrangle the complexity of Gentoo via e.g. a dedicated team of portage-wranglers

Yes, Gentoo is not the easiest to use. But I have personally groomed users of all ages, including what we will politely call advanced middle-age, whose needs are better addressed by Gentoo than a regular distribution for various reasons. None of them had IT backgrounds, and all of them had none to very limited Linux experience before. They have no problem maintaining their own machines "without breaking stuff" as you call it. If Gentoo is too difficult for you to maintain your system reliably, it's perfectly OK to use something else more suitable to your situation. That's what the Linux diverse ecosystem is for.