I run a couple small mailservers. It’s still possible.

I like terminology

It’s quick, gpu accelerated, can natively display images, and I’m not sure what else.

I don’t use the rest of enlightenment de but have stuck with terminology for years

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.

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.