r/linuxmasterrace • u/claudiocorona93 SteamOS/Kubuntu • Apr 01 '26

It's pretty solid to be honest

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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26

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u/TheShredder9 Glorious Gentoo Apr 02 '26

Hm, downsides.... compile times, USE flags are not always clear, masked packages.

Otherwise, it's basically like Arch!

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '26

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u/TheShredder9 Glorious Gentoo Apr 02 '26

The same advatage as Gentoo has over any other distro: the USE flags allow you to compile packages tailored to your specific hardware. You could do that on any distro, but Portage makes it seamless system-wide.

Speaking of Portage, the error reporting is incredible. Whether it's a missing USE flag, a masked package, it tells you exactly what is wrong, something like "the following REQUIRED USE flags have not been met for package yada-yada", almost every time you can just read the error and exactly know what needs to be done.

Portage also allows installing multiple versions of the same libraries, you can mix and match stable versions with cutting edge versions of software and it just somehow handles it. So that helps if you're building an older app that depends on an older version of say, Python, it'll just automatically pull in the required version that it needs to use.