I am looking for a distro that is based on Gentoo or is heavily inspired by it. I am a long-time Gentoo user and Debian on system where I don’t have the time to maintain it. I love the flexibility of Gentoo, but although my hardware keeps up, I find my self often not willing to wait hours for an update on my main machine. I am glad that there are some binary packages for some programs and I use flatpak, too. But even though, updates take too long, time I want to spend using my computer. I thought of going to Debian everywhere, because it is stable and does not move too fast regarding major updates. So, Arch-based distros are no option for me.
Can someone of the community recommend any Gentoo-based distros?
Definitely not Gentoo based, but if you can get by with their unique approach to basically everything, NixOS can be pretty interesting, in that while it is technically source based, binary caches are widely used to basically “pretend” to be a binary distro. And it does let you patch things shouid you want it (at the expense of recompiling everything that even slightly comes in contact with the patched package)
There are some parts that are too “baked in” to change – requiring systemd, for instance – so that may be a dealbreaker for you.
Using systemd is not deal-braking for me, but not being able to use it, would be problematic.
NixOS: I guess, I should try it. The concept sounds fascinating. Like old Sabayon, but current.
Because of the way it works, you can try out on a VM for a bit and move your config over to real hardware trivially if you end up liking it. That’s how I did it before I realized how immature it’s rocm support is and had to switch back to arch
I installed Nix in a container, so I can learn some things before I move to it. So far, I am a bit dissappointed, that it is still using Xorg.
It doesn’t have to. I ran Sway on Nix the entire time I used it, and I know Hyprland supports Nix as well
That ist interesting. Do you think a gnome session using wayland would also work?
I don’t see why it wouldn’t. You may need to enable a config option or two though. Documentation isn’t NixOS’s strongest suit.
Thx, I’ll figure it out
Isn’t Gentoo all about compiling everything?
Maybe you should search for some rolling release distribution. I’m using Arch since many years and am quite happy with it. You rarely have to build anything yourself. Only if you have to use the AUR.
I second this. It sounds that you want a rolling release distro. Suse Tumbleweed is also a good choice.
