What am I in for if I actually use this? Is it as hard to install

An experience.

No it's not you literally follow a step-by-step tutorial that has been written to accomodate even the drooliest of users

Easy interface to very much fine grained control over the software you put there.
Also no systemd. But if you care about not running systemd and you like either Arch or Debian there are derivative distributions like Devuan that achieve the same.

Follow the handbook, do everything with the defaults (suggestions) they give you in the handbook.

The gentoo package manager does not install pre-compiled software, it installs all software from source by automatic-compilation (although you can specify flags). The package manager is very "safe" to and requires you to manually edit certain files (but it's easy).

It's a very solid OS if you know what you're doing (or if you juts stick to defaults).

>>60711940
not really hard to install
just follow the handbook and select a desktop profile if you dont want to twinker that much with the use flags. Besides these and the compile time it is same as arch linux

>>60711940
It's fun but absolutely impractical unless you're customizing an install for a very specific use case and/or have a super-powerful computer to run it on and a lot of free time to learn.

It's a nice and educational experience nonetheless. Just don't expect to get it up and running as easily as a baby distro and I would recommend against it as a primary OS for desktop use.

File: gentoo.png (386KB, 1440x900px) Image search: [Google]

386KB, 1440x900px

Some common gentoo memes you may encounter:

* emerge dep resolution taking 2 minutes (especially with multilib)
* when it works its great, when some port overlay fucks shit up, its a nightmare

Basically it's better than compiling everything manually from scratch, but IMO gentoo stretches power of source distro *too much*. Like literally too much freedom is used as a main mechanism to solve major tasks of a distro (ie things like multilib) in "clever" ways.

BSD ports, on the other hand, while much less powerful than getoos are simply more reliable thanks to their simplicity.

>>60711940
>>60712659
I forgot to add that configuring the kernel might be difficult if you havent done it before.
lspci -k is enough to configure a booting kernel with all your hardware drivers. Also every package you install check your kernel config file and tells you what changes you should make in your kernel config file

>>60712047
>>60712659

Was just skimming through the installation handbook, looks doable but fairly tedious, probably won't have time to do it until next month. USE flags are honestly the main draw for me, I'm attracted to the DIY approach of an OS and Gentoo looks interesting because it seems to take it to the extreme.
How bearable are compile times on a laptop with a 7th generation i5 CPU?

>>60711940
If you want to learn, LFS is better. If you often install packages, it's unconvenient. If you mind outdated software (gcc5 in anno domini 2017????), check versions of sw you use. Otherwise, it's good and isn't systemD/Linux,if that's a concern to you.

>>60712940
i installed gentoo with a Pentium 967 within a day, so it should be bearable.

Not hard to install, just unnecessarily complicated and time consuming to maintain. Even Arch is pretty retarded unless you're a hobbyist.