Why Gentoo is a meme?

Gentoo is considered to be a “meme”[1] because it’s also considered to be one of the hardest and most difficult Linux distributions to install (and use?) by the general audience of those who—I assume—didn’t even read the manual.

What is Gentoo based on?

What is Gentoo? Gentoo is a free operating system based on Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance, and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

Why install Gentoo?

Gentoo allows users to configure which software features they wish to install, instead of the “one size fits all” approach of many binary-based distributions. Gentoo can run in a wide range of environments, from embedded systems and virtual containers (LXC, OpenVZ, etc.) through to large cluster machines.

Is Gentoo faster than Arch?

The Gentoo packages and base system are built directly from source code according to user-specified USE flags. This generally makes Arch quicker to build and update, and allows Gentoo to be more systemically customizable.

Is Gentoo still active?

But Gentoo Linux slowly lost popularity over time and is now a pale shadow of its former self in terms of usage and mind-share among Linux users (though there are still some die-hard Gentoo users left on Reddit).

What is the purpose of Gentoo?

Gentoo encourages users to build a Linux kernel tailored to their particular hardware. It allows very fine control of which services are installed and running. Memory usage can also be reduced compared to other distributions by omitting unnecessary kernel features and services.

Is Gentoo any good?

Gentoo could be the hardest distro, but I think that is the most flexible distribution because the number of possibilities in Gentoo is incredible. I think that Gentoo is very similar to LFS (Linux from scratch), because when you install the system you can build and personalize every part of it.

Is Gentoo harder to install than arch?

Installing gentoo just takes a while since you’re compiling from source. I like to configure a lot of things when installing gentoo. Arch just has precompiled binaries. I can install Arch in less than 30 minutes.

Is gentoo the fastest?

Gentoo always gets the latest faster than any other distro. The downside is, nothing is done for you. For example, recently I got pissed with ubuntu and decided to go back to gentoo. Well I installed it off the live-cd, finished it in a day.

Is installing Gentoo hard?

Another major disadvantage of Gentoo Linux is the difficulty factor. You can not expect to install this distro easily and have it work out-of-the-box. Mastering Gentoo requires an investment in time to navigate its steep learning curve.

Is Gentoo fast?

Gentoo is not a matter of speed, although it can be faster than some others because you can use optimizations when compiling and linking (and you can use SSE3 instruction set if you processor has it), but this doesn’t really improve speed very much.

Is Gentoo still relevant?