• Veneroso@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I had never installed Linux before. Back in 2006 my old college roommate told me that he was reading about it. I used Solaris Spark workstations back in college, but never ran Linux before. My other roommate ran Slackware which looked cool but I never looked into it. Anyway I had recently built a custom PC and I was trying to avoid paying the windows tax, and was growing tired of having to reinstall the cracked version I was using of “corporate windows xp” so I pulled up the installation guide, printed it out, and proceeded to install the stage 1 tarball.

      It definitely was a trial by fire. I learned a tremendous amount, and I don’t regret any of it.

      I even was playing WoW under Cedega.

      I did eventually pick up a copy of Windows XP to run in parallels for Linux, and unfortunately, had to give it up for Windows XP as the main os due to Blizzard banning people who were playing Linux at the time.

      I miss it sometimes, but I don’t have the free time to properly maintain an install of Gentoo.

      I usually run Linux Mint on my VMs and test bench hardware however because it just works.

      I ran Arch briefly but my conclusion was that if I wanted Ck and bl torture, I would just main Gentoo again.

      • nexussapphire@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Arch isn’t that bad, it’s a lot of what you have to do in Gentoo. Infact Gentoo is more manual and hands on than arch with a lot more room for error. Arch has a lot of systems service made specifically to make install and maintenance easier.

        I don’t know how long ago it was when you tried it but I’d give it another shot, it might surprise you! There’s a lot arch does to help you that most people don’t even realize.

        • Veneroso@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I ran it about 5 years ago. A friend had trouble getting the Nvidia closed source drivers installed so I spun up an install to get it done. I was able to figure it out. There was an error message that either she didn’t spot or maybe didn’t find a resolution too.

          I do like Gentoo primarily because I am a troubleshooter at heart, I just don’t always have the time to deal with a broken system anymore.

          I do get tempted to run it on bare metal from time to time. The last time I tried to install it in VirtualBox, it didn’t work out unfortunately.

          • nexussapphire@lemm.ee
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            4 months ago

            Yeah, virtual box doesn’t work all that well from my experience. If you’re on windows I’d definitely recommend checking out VMware. VMware even has support for windows 95 and stuff.

            It’s been about five years but I’ve managed to install arch just fine on virtual box (in macos) but VMware is just a more robust polished experience and it has a free version on windows.