A stupid arch user tries gentoo for the first time

2
Last Updated: 2025/06/14

hi I use arch btw.

More specifically I've used arch for almost 3 years. This has been my main distro for a while, and probably will be for the future. But I like to try out other distros too. Whether it is on a VM or on my trusty black brick, the thinkpad X260. I've tried & daily driven almost any distros you probably know, from simple ones like mint & fedora, to more complicated ones like Nix.

This time though I wanted to try this little distro called gentoo. It's kinda similar to arch. Both are very minimal distros, where you have to build your environment yourself. Unlike arch though, gentoo's package is mainly source based. So instead of installing a binary program, installing packages means that you'll have to build it. I assume that the experiece there would be pretty similar, just that installing packages is a bit more complicated.

Installing

As per usual, I will be using my distrohop laptop X260.

After booting into the environment, connecting to internet, partitioning the drive, the usual stuff. Then installing the stage files & base system goes without any problem. Working with portage is not that hard at the moment.

And now it's time for installing the kernel. Setting up for the kernel installation is fine, I got a bit confused when reading the installkernel session of the handbook, but I made it work. Configuring & building the kernel though... oh boy. You know I could just use the distributed kernel if I want, but I want that full gentoo experience, so let's get suffering.

We got a wall of configs here. After a lot of times, I have a good enough config, so let's go ahead and build it!

While the kernel is compiling, it's TIME FOR :

THE FOOD BREAK

This food break is sponsored by : MOS Burger
Get your rice burger today for just 75 bucks (NTD btw)

FOOD BREAK OVER

Alright the kernel is compiled. Time to do the final setup. Installing the bootloaders, and reboot.

Will it boot?

It booted.

Well at least it let me log in. But I can't do anything after that. It always showed the "read-only file system" error when I want to add a user. After looking around, I found the problem. I forgot the s in defaults in my fstab. woops.

Well anyways, it booted for real. I can do things. Now, the fun part

Setting up my system

So here's the apps I want:

First up emacs, this one is simple. Just emerge it and good to go. MATE though prooved to be a bit of a challenge. I need to fiddle with the USE flags and the auto-generated package.use files for god knows how long. Also waiting for a DE to complie would be very long, but that's what I expected.

Around 2 hours & a Trials and Tribulations later (by that I mean I take this time to chip away ep2, got to the second investigation segment), it finally finished. Now just get some display manager running and, oh it didn't work. X infact didn't work at all. Well damn. I'll have to fix it tomorrow. I need some sleep.

Day 2

Well I finally found the problem. Apparently I forgot to enable something in my kernel. With the kernel rebuilt, the DM finally showed up. And I got MATE working now. Wooo

Next up: web browser. But first I need to setup flatpak, cause no way in hell I'm gonna compile a whole damn browser on my 10 year old laptop.

Well after I got that done I didn't do a whole lot afterward, so that's it for day 2

Day 3

This day is mostly import the old files into this. Before that though, I needed to do another kernel confil cause I forgot to enable NTFS support. Love you microsoft(ok fine it's not your fault. but only this one). Got my peffered terminal ready, giving my desktop a nice look, trying to install my other wm I want to try, figuring out how to work with masked package, and writing this paragraph on this computer.

Oh god oh fuck I hadn't done anything for like a week

A week goes by without doing anything. There's a reason though. I have better things to do. Like being bad at videogames! But anyway now I have a whole 2 months of summer break, so I'm using this lil thing less. Oh wait, I havn't got niri to work.