I have just installed Gentoo hardened Linux on my laptop. This distribution is far more hands-on than Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but it was enjoyable to install. I
have not built and installed a desktop environment yet, I am just using the framebuffer console and this suits me fine. Once the system is installed, the software
available depends upon the USE flags and this may be changed at any time. The eselect profile list command will show what profiles are available.
Selecting a new profile and then updating world will allow a new set of software to be installed. This is very useful when intending to install a desktop
environment. This will take care of this task: emerge --ask --update --deep --newuse @world. Then the user will be able to install a new array of
packages according to the selected USE flags. The emerge world command takes an extremely long time to complete, depending upon the software that will be fetched
and compiled, but it is worth it. Gentoo is a more involved Linux distribution than the massively popular Ubuntu distribution, but the process of compiling
countless packages from source code would be a very long task. The eselect utility allows the user to select a new profile for the system, this will allow the
setup of Systemd and the Gnome desktop environment.
That is if the user desires Systemd. I am currently using OpenRC to initialize my Gentoo system. And the kernel is configured like a Live system, it sets up all
the hardware on boot, this is a very good system to use, I am enjoying it. I just ran emerge world and this had to fetch and build 57 packages. But I just need to
get a nice .bashrc file and associated scripts to finish setting this system up. There are profiles that are listed with the eselect profile list
command. To select a standard Linux desktop profile, I used this command. eselect profile set 3. Then I run this command to fetch and build the
desktop profile packages. I had to wait for 176 packages to download and compile, this is worth it though. Even a Fluxbox desktop with Tint2 and Network Manager
would be more than enough for me. It would be interesting if Ubuntu had a distribution with nothing but source packages and the user would install a package by
downloading and building source code automatically upon apt install mc for example. That would be very interesting to say the least. Is anyone
working on something like this? A Gentoo inspired Ubuntu distribution. There was a Solaris distribution that was built upon Ubuntu, but that seems to have faded
into obscurity.
The main advantage of Gentoo is the obvious customization of the distribution, I have full control over the build flags for the software, and this can result in
a faster system. Even though the installation can take a few hours it is still very popular on Reddit. The only roadblock I have is this error. I cannot finish the installation of a desktop environment until I find a fix for this. I could try installing a binary package instead, that would be sufficient to satisfy the dependencies and allow the installation of the desktop environment to complete.