I've been meaning to write such a post for some time now. Thanks for prompting me to add my 2 cents.
I've been using Gentoo for perhaps 15 years. There have been a few rough patches along the way resolved by new reinstalls, but overall this has been by far the best computing environment I've ever used. (And one of the best online communities I've ever lurked in.) I remember feeling quite apprehensive at my first install after giving the Handbook my first look, but that install went well, and I've never looked back. I've been able to transition from using Gentoo as a professional development system for large scale parallel numerical stuff, to using it for some personal work in medical informatics, and lately digital photography. In general, I've found that Gentoo just works, given a little effort to understand how to make it work via its truly wonderful array of well written documentation. I really like the ease with which I've been able to venture into new categories of software and computing. Every time I've needed something new, it's been in portage and has been fairly easy to install, configure, and use. I recently had to do reinstalls on all my systems due to disk failures. Took a few days, but I've been living in a sweet spot ever since, with everything working perfectly on all systems. Thanks to all who've made this possible! On Sat, Apr 16, 2016 at 10:48 AM, Alan Mackenzie <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, Gentoo. > > I'm just saying hello to confirm I'm still here. > > For many months now, Gentoo has simply worked for me, without problems. > I sync my system several times a week, and emerge just works. > > The last bit of excitement I had was in early 2015 when I was trying to > sort out the mess in my xfce4 system after gnome-3 had been made stable. > In the end, I gave up and reinstalled Gentoo, which this time took me > only a week. > > Admittedly, there's very little which is cutting edge on my system - the > box is 6½ years old, it boots with lilo on an old fashioned BIOS, my > filesystems are ext3 (or in one case, ext2) on spinning rust. The only > remotely adventurous things I've got are RAID-1 (via the kernel) and > lvm2. > > So a big thanks to all the developers who've brought about this happy > state of affairs! > > -- > Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany). > >
