If you don’t care about the benefits of Gentoo, such as the excellent use flags system, then no it’s very much not worth it.

If you’d rather that every program comes compiled with every possible option, and requires every possible dependency because of this, then you’d be better suited by a binary distro.

If, however, you’re the kind of person that wonders “why does my torrent client support sound, which pulls in these five audio dependencies? I don’t ever need it to make noise, can’t I just disable the ability for torrents to go ‘bing’ when they’re done and forego installing those dependencies?”, then gentoo might be for you.

K&R has always seemed like home to me, but I agree that Allman is pretty alright

Mandrake is another

Nearly identical story here, and I agree.

Habits and hardware are definitely the big ones to overcome. I still remember how absolutely lost I felt the first couple times I tried installing slackware in the 90s. I could install/set up windows in my sleep. But then slackware dropped to an unfamiliar command prompt, I can’t dir, there isn’t even a C drive, and now I’m expected to configure something called xfree86. Luckily I wasn’t told to use vi or I’d be stuck there to this day.

New users aren’t thrown into the deep end quite like that anymore, but it’s still a big change for a windows power user. So much of what you learned is not applicable or just the wrong way to do things. Mac users and Windows non-power-users seem to have a much easier time accepting the changes.

It’s definitely not for everyone (is any OS?) but it’s been ‘ready’ as a desktop OS for me since Mandrake 8 in ~2001. That’s about when I ditched windows 2000 and haven’t looked back.

For what it’s worth, I’ve found that windows and mac forums have similar issues if you approach them as an outsider.

I feel similar frustration when faced with trying to accomplish things on those OSes. Mac forums in particular are terrible about “you shouldn’t want to do that”.

It doesn’t solve your problem, just wanted to share that I’ve experienced it from the other side.

As a gentoo user, I’m always confused when people think gentoo is about multi-day compiles. Rebuilding the whole system takes a few hours (not that I ever need to do that), and binary packages are available for the big stuff if you want it. It’s basically just arch with more configuration options.

Not insisting you or anyone should run it, but it’s not as ridiculous as people seem to think.

Unrelated but also kind of related: check out bedrock Linux. It’s a trip.

It lets you ‘hijack’ a Linux install and then you can use package managers and packages from other distros. It’s magical how well it works.

Fair enough

I had good luck with quad swap but I’d easily believe the ease of operation depended on exact version of the console etc

Yes. Though it doesn’t have to be cheese. Carrot will grate just as well.

A lot of people never got the swap trick message it seems. Especially the quad-swap that worked on later consoles.

It was my main method, but I’ve talked to a surprising number of people who told me it didn’t exist/work

Watching the video this cheat code method seems more complex

No operating system meets those criteria, open source or commercial.

We need to find a new way to hate on stupid vehicles without body shaming.

The guys with small dicks never did anything wrong. I’m sure some of those truck drivers have massive cannons the diameter of a coke can, but that doesn’t excuse their stupid wasteful vanity machines.

They weren’t cheap but I got my sennheiser Hd650s around 2004 and still use them daily.

I’ve replaced the ear pads and cord once each, otherwise they’re original.

There are a lot of uses of trucks beyond transporting construction materials. I wouldn’t want to tow a trailer loaded with round bales with a car, or try to put a big block chevy in the trunk.

There’s clearly some demand for small trucks, too. I’ve been seeing an increasing number of imported kei trucks around me.

I had a 1986 Mazda B2000 for a while. Very useful, tough little thing, even though it only had like 75hp.

Yep. Half my ram as level one, and then a 500gb SSD as L2.

Definitely more than I need for the L2 as the hit rate is only 15% (vs 99% for ARC), but I don’t think there’s much of a downside to slightly over-sizing it these days (there used to be, but L2 is more ram-efficient now).

Not who you responded to, but I have a similar setup using ZFS.

6 drives in raid 6, and then an SSD cache.

There are sites like ratemds.com, depending on your area.

But like most internet reviews, people tend to only post negative experiences or astroturfing.

That’s not universally true. My thinkpad has the most colour accurate screen in my house. Much better then my apple laptops or pretty decent dell screens.

The issue is Lenovo will also sell absolute garbage screens, so you need to pay attention when ordering. Iirc mine was a $500 upgrade or something equally shocking.

Exactly what my name promises, no story.