I have an old iMac that I am planning to install some flavor of Linux on and while I was looking at various distros it occurred to me that it might be a good exercise to install Gentoo on it. Other than a separate machine for documentation and downloading the necessary packages, what else should I have set up to try this? Has anyone installed Gentoo on a Mac before? If so, what concerns are there related to things like Apple’s implementation of EFI?
Been there, done that. I was a Gentoo user for about 10 years.
It costs a LOT of time. Don‘t do it. Use a binary distro and spend the time with friends and family…
I had been a Gentoo user for a couple of years on MacBook Pro. I can say only this: it takes a lot of time, don’t do it. Rather: go out with family, have a beer or two.
what’s “family” ? is that food ?
I’d also add a build machine to the setup. Building a modern desktop system on such a machine would take days.
Why cant you just use Binaries? I dont get Gentoo I guess
building yourself your packages, installing a system made specifically for your machine
I say go for it. I’ve been using it for about 2 years, and I no longer feel like distro-hopping (not sure if you fall into that category of Linux user), because it’s not opinionated about how it’s meant to be used. It gives you all the tools (and foot-guns) to do whatever you want with your computer.
You don’t need separate computers for a local mirror and/or build server to run Gentoo, I’ve never done that. I’ve never owned a Mac, so I can’t really offer any tips hardware-wise, but use a live USB of a distro that you’re already familiar with, so you can refer to the handbook as you go. The people on Gentoo’s IRC channel & forums are very helpful if you come against any roadblocks.
It does take a while, not gonna gloss over that. Once you have it installed, there are very few issues that would require a full re-install. Portage is an awesome package manager, the language of its warnings/errors took some time to wrap my brain around, but it’s very verbose in describing what’s going on.
How well does Gentoo work with “stable” systems? I can imagine having an OS making the most of modern hardware makes sense, but compile times especially for things that actually matter like Web browser or KDE, are probably insane? So I wouldnt update that often, but Gentoo is not a stable Distro right?
