This is a perennial question in my mind and also in the forums. What's driving me to ask it again is that I've recently spent some time doing Gentoo and there, I can easily see the tradeoffs - Gentoo allows the admin FULL control over the system and is very minimal and peppy, yet as cutting edge as desired, when compared to other distros that don't like you to mess with this, or that and they drag in sooo many dependencies, all built for every architecture and bloated. MX and Mint are very well integrated, but both are opinionated, Gentoo is, a little bit, but not much. The docs are great and the community friendly, knowledgeable and helpful. The only real downside... it takes forever to build stuff. I suppose if you spent a year figuring out exactly what you wanted, you could then build it over a week, and use it until you need update, then more building. It's horrible, honestly. So, ultimate customizabilty and very machine optimized code at the cost of endless hours of compiling. I'd say the learning curve is high, but nowadays, I'm used to it, so it doesn't seem bad. I've kept it on my older laptop, but will be putting FreeBSD back on the newer one, so I've bought into its advantages on the one hand, but not on the other. I'm not sold on it, but it's got appeal. I'm on the fence... But that's Gentoo, I'm actually curious about FreeBSD .
So, if you know ports and gentoo, is there significant common ground that they're kinda like each other, or are there significant differences - either in tasks performed or in outcomes that they are worlds apart? And, what drives you to choose ports and is it all compile and wait, 7 days a week, or what? Maybe I'm over simplifying things, what are the actual advantages/disadvantages? More than just speed/customizability vs compile cycling all the time?
So, if you know ports and gentoo, is there significant common ground that they're kinda like each other, or are there significant differences - either in tasks performed or in outcomes that they are worlds apart? And, what drives you to choose ports and is it all compile and wait, 7 days a week, or what? Maybe I'm over simplifying things, what are the actual advantages/disadvantages? More than just speed/customizability vs compile cycling all the time?