[gylterud]

I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have the same setup on every machine I use.

[speed_spread]

What Gentoo really needs is an official immutability mechanism like ostree used by Fedora Silverblue or ZFS/btrfs snapshots of the root/boot volumes. This way the ever-experimental nature of the distro would be compensated by having an easy mechanism to rollback to previous known-good builds.

[techcode]

I haven't gotten around to experimenting with https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/templates and https://old.calculate-linux.org/main/en/calculate-assemble

TL;DR: you can pre-configure and keep updating/building new versions of your own live-boot image of Gentoo/Calculate. Which kind of get's you "previous known-good builds" just the other way around.

Oh and the other thing I also never needed to use is update/rescue of Gentoo/Calculate installation through it's flip-flopping between two root partitions.

Calculate installer by default creates two root partitions, but I've only ever used one. And so far `cl-update` never broke the system - even when I was so far behind that my version of python and glibc got masked (or maybe even removed).

Back on vanilla Gentoo - being that far behind usually meant it was easier to reinstall Gentoo from stage3 :D

[MarsIronPI]

Hah, same! NixOS is perfect for me; I love the declarative aspect. But Portage is far-and-away the best traditional package manager I've ever used. It's truly phenomenal.

[arendtio]

I think Gentoo is very stable, but you have to make use of revdep-rebuild and know what you are doing (meaning: it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot).

[zppln]

I've been on Gentoo for my gaming desktop for like 2-3 years now and I don't think I've ever had an update break anything.

I will say though that my valgrind is broken due to march native. :)

[paulf38]

If anyone can help adding AVX512 (and other CPU features) support then that would be most welcome. It’s a major task though.