Gentoo Is The Best Pain In The Ass Possible

The first computer I used that was more than just 16 or 8 bits with BASIC was a Mac. It was a nice computer for the day. Mac OS 7 was pretty nice in the day. I wouldn't have done as well in school without it. Though perhaps I would have been a bit better off without the internet when I was a young teen.

Back in the day Macs were pretty good. Yeah, they were expensive, just like they are now, but they didn't have quite the same premium. They were also educational computers. They were pretty reasonable for what you got. Sure, you could build your own computer even then, but it likely meant running DOS and Windows. Though now, looking back, I kinda wish I had at least one computer running DOS with access to BBS systems. Maybe an Amiga. An Amiga would have been nice. Too bad they didn't stick around.

But after the 90's it got worse and worse. There are still some computers that are affordable, but they're not made as well as they once were. They also started acting like assholes when it came to the repair of them. Their "geniuses" aren't even allowed to do certain minor repairs. Often they just act like glorified postal workers. What's worst about this is that every time you have certain issues with your device, it's sent in for what's essentially a very shitty form of refurbishment. They wipe your data with no care to even try to back it up, then replace the board or whatever else is fucked with a refurbished part, that may actually be in a far worse state than the one you had. In some cases they'll replace the whole device with a refurbished one. So you bought something new, took care of it, then something went wrong, and bang, all your care to avoid scratches and such is for naught, because now you have a shitty refurbished one with whatever problems are left from the previous owner. And due to the number of people "buying" refurbished products because they won't repair even simple issues, the price of refurbished items is kept high due to artificial demand.

I don't really remember why I chose to buy a windows laptop when I did. I think it had something to do with development. I had software I needed to run on Windows or something. It was a pain in the ass on Mac. Programming on a Mac is a pain in the ass. At least it was back in the day. You had to buy proprietary compilers and shit. I lost years of potential development time due to that shit. I wish there was Linux back then.

That laptop was a nightmare. It was overpriced and shitty and everything kept breaking. It was a lemon. That was sometimes the way things were back in the day. Most of the problems were caused by it overheating. They wouldn't even let me open it to do any sort of repair, even though that's technically illegal. After the warranty ended and they wouldn't repair it anymore, I found out that it was basically an issue of substandard thermal paste. If they just put on slightly better thermal paste, it wouldn't have overheated itself so many times, killing tons of components.

Around that time when I was learning how shitty companies can be with repairing computers, sometimes taking months where I didn't have my computer, and just replacing it with another one that broke in a day or two or even arrived non-functional, I started experimenting with Linux. I was using CentOS on servers already to run websites. I tried that on a few computers. I also built Gentoo for the first time. It was a serious pain in the ass back then, but you could get far more power out of a system, running without a front-end GUI. I had also tried Arch and a number of other distros, but things were different back then. I couldn't manage to get Arch working. It was a real pain back then. It didn't have a GUI. You had to build it yourself. If you've ever tried to build Gnome or KDE, you know what a pain in the ass it is. I could have probably stuck with simple ones like Debian and CentOS, but there was something I liked about Gentoo. You got far more control, even if it was a pain in the ass.

Then I ended up with a Mac Mini for a while. There were also some Mac laptops in there at some times. I can't remember too well. Mac Minis are actually pretty good little machines. Well, they were. I guess they still are, but Apple stopped covering their boards with anti-moisture resistant coating and they started acting like shit. I think it was when they started soldering the RAM on the motherboards of various computers that I really stopped wanting to have anything to do with Macs though. Plus, it was just easier to use Linux as a developer, and the latest version of Windows was Vista. I decided that I wanted to build my next computer and I was going to put Linux on it.

I chose Gentoo. I like Gentoo. By that time I had put it on quite a few machines over the years, because it will run on practically anything. You can also customize it way more than any other operating system. I don't have to worry about how someone else set up the operating system. I can customize it to whatever degree I feel like dealing with. It's also far less of a pain to compile something, as long as someone else has compiled it before for a recent version of Gentoo. There are problems with some packages, but it felt like there were more problems with using other distros and getting apps I wanted.

It's really hard to compile some things. It's a pain in the ass when the documentation sucks. And the documentation almost always sucks. They leave out requirements. Things don't always go perfectly. Then you gotta search the web or go to some forums. It's really a pain in the ass. But Gentoo does that all for you. You compile shit by just typing in "emerge".

That "emerge" is one of the best things about Gentoo and the worst. The tool is called "Portage", which is part of the confusion itself. If it's called portage, why is the command emerge? Why isn't it called Emergence? Why don't you type in "portage emerge" or something? Every time you have to update your computer you have to "emerge" dozens or even hundreds of packages, all of which need to be compiled from source. Of course, for that you get a fully custom computer. But while it's compiling all that shit, your computer is barely usable. You have to compile things during the night if you don't want it interfering with your use. And then it can of course fail for whatever reason.

I like Gentoo though. Every time I've tried another distro over the years, it hasn't been enough. It's a pain in the ass sometimes. Sometimes things don't compile right and I have to do a search on the internet for potential solutions or even go to forums. It's not used as much as Debian or Ubuntu, so there's less help out there for it, but I wouldn't want to use Ubuntu anyway. Maybe Debian. Debian is alright.

Gentoo is a joy of an operating system, with momentary interruptions of pain in the ass issues that can take days or weeks to solve completely. But my computer is almost always usable even during those times. I have to royally fuck it up to have to start up from a USB stick and fix it. With Windows it won't even let you keep using it while updating anymore. How fucked is that? I always disabled the updates and just set it to check and alert me when they were available. With Gentoo, I have to check for updates and I can do most of them while I continue to work. It's only when you're doing a major update where it's compiling something like Google Chromium (open source version of Chrome) where your computer really grinds to a halt. Or if you don't have enough RAM. Then it's better if you do it from the command line. So, basically, only in the worst case is it as bad as Windows when updating.

Sometimes I put off updating Gentoo because it's a pain in the ass, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

_{Portage from Gentoo Linux after calling for updates by Christian Faulhammer 23 June 2006 GNU Free Documentation License (source)}