What I have learned with Gentoo

If you are thinking in try Gentoo, this is for YOU!

4 years ago I saw a post from Avelino where they show a kernel being compiled on his notebook. I remember that because was the first time I heard about Gentoo.

At the time, I was working with a guy that use Arch. I told him that want to learn more about how Linux works. After a talk about Arch and Gentoo, I decided to start my journey in Gentoo world.

4 years have passed and I want to share a little about my experience.

It’s not easy

The first “flavor” of Linux that I have used was Debian. After a few years, I move to Ubuntu.

Different from those experience, Gentoo was the first time where I have to understand and install all parts of Linux because when you finish the installation you just have a terminal.

Patience

Back in 2014 when I pick up my notebook and one tutorial that I have saw on youtube about “how to install Gentoo”, I have to do the first step “installation” 3 times. If I remember well, took me almost 2 weeks to finish my environment to work.

So, YEAH! You probably will need a LOT of patience.

Copy and Paste

Don’t be ashame of copy and paste another people configs. The final result maybe not the exact way you want, but everyone needs to start at some point.

Do little modifications

With a fully functional OS, we can do little modifications to understand better the impact on our system.

Sometimes things will go very wrong, your system will break, but remember:

With patience, you will learn new things and fix your system!!!

Learning is the KEY!

Without any doubt, using Gentoo make me learn things that I never imagine Linux have.

After a while, I started to see Linux as a big box of Legos, where we can change a piece of it and everything still works.

For me, use Gentoo made me want to understand better how things works. With time the curiosity and persistence to make things works the best way possible became part of me, and that is AWESOME!

Hope you enjoy the journey!

Thanks you for reading.