Gentoo Reviews & Product Details

Gentoo is good for security and speed, if you choose to compile all of your packages.

Gentoo does a wonderful job of keeping security updates available. It can be a good install with minimal overhead. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gentoo is more complicated to setup and maintain than other linux operating systems. Install time is quite a bit longer when installing from scratch.

Gentoo is not for new users. I have seen many individuals attempt to install it for desktop use and fail.

The package manager for Gentoo is overly complicated. I love eix's search, but dealing with masked packages is a pain.

It took us months to upgrade our custom packages to meet the requirements of new gentoo versions. This kept us from being able to offer the newest software when released, and often caused us to use legacy software versions while trying to keep up with those changes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Package management system, emerge, portage, use flag, ebuild etc Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Slow compiling time during installation and upgrading Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gentoo is the "best os" from my personal perspective, because you can install exactly what you want. It means you can only install a selected package (only a www server, ftp server, load balancing server or email server) and nothing more and this is the most important fact about Gentoo.

In opposite, compared to other distributions, Ubuntu, Fedora, .. there are many predefined packages that cannot be disabled and need to be installed and then manually removed. All these manual removation can create security risks to your system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Gentoo also has some flaws, it's a perfectly customized system, but you can easily face some errors when you try to compile / install some packages and it can be a really painful sort to the problem. However, as you can see all our servers still running on Gentoo. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

You can always compile from source, and optimize for cpu. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The time you need to wait compiling even when it is automated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

portage tree - the use of it, flexibility and structure. The handbook online effort work and mantained for many years by the team which makes possible people understand how and why Gentoo works as it does. The flexibility of the Stage tarball archive, in which lets you decide how deep and far depending your needs you can configure your system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

sometimes it takes some time to release the new versions in the portage in comparison with other distros which makes it sometimes a little hard, however it is understandable that in order to have a complete ecosystem paired the release of new versions would be stable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I liked Gentoo because it offered me a completely different look to how Linux worked and all I could learn in the process. For me it was good because most Linux distributions at the time were really oriented to make them as easy as possible to install for 1st time users. But Gentoo had a different approach almost like a Linux from scratch depending on which stage you select to start with. I selected stage 3 at first but then I was eager to learn how stage 1 and 2 worked and I learned a lot thanks to that.

I had a lot of deeper knowledge on Linux because I was not relying on graphical tools but on the command line, that set up my profile to become a Unix and Linux Sysadmin for the next 15+ years.

Emerge was also great, the fact that you can customize the compilation flags was amazing to the best possible performance depending on what processor you were running it in and that was awesome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I am not sure if I disliked anything about it. The learning curve was really fine and it is until today an amazing distro. I had it on a time where I did not have a broadband connection so using emerge to update was really a downside because of how slow it was, besides that there was not many stage 3 repositories to get the packages from at the time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Good program performance and less RAM consumption, the best for low-resource computers.

Adapt to any need, web server, personal computer, on my phone.

Open Source and free.

Kernel tested and tested before launch.

Create 100% free system thanks to Portage.

Compile any type of file with the default installation. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is difficult to configure and does not bring default programs, after installation you have to download and install the programs you need.

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Gentoo is totally free maintained by the community without any company behind where you can have a completely free and secure Open Source system.

Just install the programs necessary for its function, where you can choose what to do next.

With Gentoo I have a very secure and robust server, where I can modify and install what I want, receive updates first than other Linux distributions which gives me more security on my server.

Gentoo demands very few PC resources, you can install on any PC with the basics and there decide what to install to work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Upon receiving an automatic update, sometimes I get an error with my system, which makes some processes stop stopping my server from working and the compiled programs are very difficult to install. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The best thing about Gentoo is portage! It allows you to have several versions of the same package. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The sad thing is that you have to be pretty experienced to work with this distro. Especially when emerge conflicts involved :) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I've liked the possibility to choose what deps to install and build a system that suits at his best the hardware Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In some cases it takes too long to have a working machine. The training curve is really vertical Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.