In Part I, I discussed the idea of installing a Gentoo partition on my machine. Part II delved into the why and how of starting out, including my initial frustrations of installing Gentoo on a fresh Bootcamp partition. Part III discussed the rage and horror I felt when I thought I lost my data after installing Grub.
To wrap up this series, I’ll discuss why installing Gentoo was completely worth the steep learning curve and why I’ve found operating system bliss.
Once I sorted out every issue with Grub and rEFIt, I found myself sitting in front of a typical Bash prompt. I didn’t really know where to start, but I knew I needed to setup my installation. The beauty of Gentoo is that it’s YOUR setup: Once again it’s an operating system of options. You can install whatever you need. Or not install anything. And once you install it, you configure it accord to your needs. It’s entirely up to you.
Speaking from the perspective of a seasoned Windows/OS X/Ubuntu user, I’ve haven’t quite experienced the beauty offered by a wholly customizable system since my old MS DOS days back in the… 80s, when I used to fiddle with boot options and write autoexec files to play particular games (remember that?!).
Gentoo is exceedingly powerful, and it’s power shines through in its fine-tuned package system, Portage. I prefer Portage over apt and yum, now that I’m accustomed to it. Like everything with Gentoo, there’s a learning curve and Portage is no exception. Mastering the ubiquitous USE flags, for example, is key to setting up an efficient, uncluttered system.
Similarly, because it begins life as a very basic system, configuring a custom kernel (and making sure it works) isn’t necessarily trivial but highly recommended. You will also need to write several configuration files in order for the system to work the way a typical Linux distro might work, but for the power user this just might be bliss (it certainly was for me).
Yes, after nearly pulling my hair out with frustration over frustration at the install process, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Gentoo, overall, happens to be one of the most polished Linux distributions that I’ve used. I now prefer it over Ubuntu, Fedora and OpenSUSE. It’s truly the operating system for a computing power user, and offers unparalleled customization.
For me, it’s almost the perfect operating system. I look forward to further customizations, frustrations and power!
