Comment by Fiveplus

> The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool.

I tried Gentoo around the time that OP started using it, and I also really liked that aspect of it. Most package managers really struggle with this, and when there is configuration, the default is usually "all features enabled". So, when you want to install, say, ffmpeg on Debian, it pulls in a tree of over 250 (!!) dependency packages. Even if you just wanted to use it once to convert a .mp4 container into .mkv.

> Since you've been on the ride since '04, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. How do you feel the maintenance burden compares today versus the GCC 3.x era? With the modern binhost fallback and the improvements in portage, I feel like we now spend less time fighting rebuild loops than back then? But I wonder if long time users feel the same.

I'm another one on it since the same era :)

In general stable has become _really_ stable, and unstable is still mostly usable without major hiccups. My maintenance burden is limited nowadays compared to 10y ago - pretty much running `emerge -uDN @world --quiet --keep-going` and fixing issues if any, maybe once a month I get package failures but I run a llvm+libcxx system and also package tests, so likely I get more issues than the average user on GCC.

For me these days it's not about the speed anymore of course, but really the customization options and the ability to build pretty much anything I need locally. I also really like the fact that ebuilds are basically bash scripts, and if I need to further customize or reproduce something I can literally copy-paste commands from the package manager in my local folder.

The project has successfully implemented a lot of by-default optimizations and best practices, and in general I feel the codebases for system packages have matured to the point where it's odd to run in internal compiler errors, weird dependency issues, whole-world rebuilds etc. From my point of view it also helped a lot that many compilers begun enforcing more modern and stricter C/C++ standards over time, and at the same time we got Github, CI workflows, better testing tools etc.

I run `emerge -e1 @world` maybe once a year just to shake out stuff lurking in the shadows (like stuff compiled with clang 19 vs clang 21), but it's really normally not needed anymore. The configuration stays pretty much untouched unless I want to enable a new USE for a new package I'm installing.

To be fair it was not that difficult to set create a pure 64 bit binary distro and there were a few of them. The real issue was to figure out how to do mixed 32/64 bit and this is where the fight about /lib directories originated. In a pure 64 bit distro the only way to run 32 bit binaries was to create a chroot with a full 32 bit installation. It took a while before better solutions were agreed to. This was an era of Flash and Acrobat Reader - all proprietary and all 32 bit only so people really cared about 32 bit.

gcc 3.3 to 3.4 was a big thing, and could cause some issues if people didnt follow the upgrade procedures, and also many c++ codebases would need minor adjustments.. this has been much much less of a problem since.

Additionally gentoo has become way more strict with use flag dependencies, and it also checks if binaries are depending on old libs, and doesnt remove them when updating a package, such that the "app depends on old libstdc++" doesnt happen anymore. It then automatically removes the old when nothing needs it anymore

I have been running gentoo since before 04, continously, and things pretty much just work. I would be willing to put money that I spend less time "managing my OS" than most who run other systems such as osx, windows, debian etc. Sure, my cpu gets to compile a lot, but thats about it.

And yes, the "--omg-optimize" was never really the selling point, but rather the useflags, where theres complete control. Pretty much nothing else comes close, and it is why gentoo is awesome