[jaimie]

I feel fortunate to have learned this lesson right before grad school… I used to run Gentoo with all kinds of optimization flags. The day of a conference deadline, I mucked up my /etc/ pretty bad. Switched to Debian and never looked back - sometimes you just need something that works.

[ekianjo]

For servers, Debian makes a lot of sense. For desktop Linux, I can't imagine living with outdated package, kernels and applications and trying to hack my way around with ppa's or other systems like Flatpaks or Appimages. Rolling distro all the way.

[zepearl]

Same opinion, I would say "it depends".

Personally I like Gentoo on the desktop especially in relation to when I code (e.g. very handy to be able to easily switch SW-versions of some packages while always using the same repository). I use it as well on some servers as root OS (I mean the one that runs mainly just the hypervisor), if they have special needs (e.g. if for some reason I want/have to use a recent version of some SW, e.g. ZFS, Kernel, firewall, QEMU, etc...).

On the other hand for VMs I usually just use Debian or Mint, as maintenance/upgrade effort is a lot lower & quicker. In some cases I still have to use PPAs but they're usually exceptions (e.g. Postgres 13 & kernel 5.10 & Clickhouse for Debian 10).

[Taek]

Same. And I loved Gentoo so much. Made me feel like a car mechanic, upgrading his machine with all the custom parts.

I would go back to running Gentoo if I had the time to mess around, it was a ton of fun and it really did give you a system that was truly yours. But it also needed a lot of love to keep running smoothly. And I don't miss those compile times.

[raegis]

I have the same story. I ran Gentoo on all my machines for 5 years (2002-2007) and after the umpteenth update which broke printing, I switched to Debian stable and never looked back.

[keyb0ardninja]

You should use btrfs with snapshots. You won't be in that situation ever again. Just a suggestion.

[wongarsu]

That's solving the problem by adding complexity. Switching to Debian is solving the problem by taking away complexity. I know which one I'd prefer

[lillecarl]

I disagree, using a filesystem with snapshot support is hardly adding complexity (to the problem, sure the kernel code for btrfs might be more complex, but It's mainline since years and won't eat your data). I interpret your comment to suggest unwise practices for data management. Being able to do snapshots and send them off to wherever is important. This fills the void on your system that git fills for your source-code.