Hehe... I installed Gentoo last year and I was thrown in the deepest of deep ends after having to set up a custom initramfs for my LUKS setup... took about a week to get it running...
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what weirdness are you doing that Dracut can't handle it?
I was too lazy to actually learn dracut, and I thought that setting up custom initramfs would help me gain insight into the linux boot process. Normal Gentoo stuff lol
Well done! Not too hard?
No it wasn't bad actually with the hand-holding a long the way, I mainly followed the handbook but if I didn't understand anything then I went back to the MO video to see what he did. Compiling from source is definitely what took the longest but that's to be expected with Gentoo. The overall install process felt like a bit more involved Arch install.
I did it once on the first intel MacBook. It compiled for like 14 hours.
What is the value proposition of Gentoo over, say, something like NixOS?
Actual USE flags I guess? If you ultimately want these is a different question though
USE flags and profiles.
I have one old laptop where I decided to test some more obscure Gentoo setups. I chose musl as libc and took llvm toolchain to compile stuff. (All experimental)
Interesting, looked at the Gentoo docs to understand USE flags. Nix has similar capabilities, where some packages expose configuration options that apply to the build, but it's not a overtly named feature consistently applies across all packages. It seems that something like USE flags could be implemented rather easily by Nix but was either deemed not necessary or was an oversight. You can still change the build for any package but it might involve introspecting the package definition to figure out what to change so not meant as a first class mechanism like USE flags.
Edit: found this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/12877
USE flags have some inherent "issues" or rather downsides that make them non-options for some distributions.
First, they create a much larger number of package variants, simplified 2^(number of USE flags applicable to package). This is fine if you don't want to supply binaries to your users. Second, the gain they bring to the average workstation is rather insignificant today. Users usually want all functionality available and not save 30 kb of RAM and then suddenly have to rebuild world because they find out they're missing a USE flag that they suddenly need. Also, providing any kind of support for a system where the user doesn't run the binaries you provided and maybe even changed dependencies (e.g. libressl instead of openssl) is probably impossible.
It's very cool stuff if you want to build a system very specific to your needs and hardware, and I do believe that NixOS could have profited in some parts from it, but I don't have specific ideas.