It's not you Gentoo, it's me. I'm just not good enough.

I've been trying to like Gentoo for over four years, ever since I installed it on my primary laptop. I love the idea of having the fine-tuned control that Gentoo offers, and I love the idea that everything I install is tailored to my specific system.

But despite my best intentions I have not mastered it - in fact I barely feel like I understand it. When I remember to update it a couple times a week everything is pretty smooth. Go much longer than that and all bets are off. If I go on a long vacation I dread coming back to a Gentoo update. I just don't have the discipline to keep up.

Lately portage has been scolding me because some random packages are trying to install different versions of openssl. I've been ignoring it for weeks while I muster the courage to solve it.

And in my experience this kind of problem is super common. Either I'm pulling multiple versions of a package into the same slot, or I'm trying to merge a masked package, or some package is trying to put files in a place it doesn't own, or who knows...

Every time I try to solve one of these issues it's like I'm starting from scratch. I read manpages, online docs, bug trackers. I try various incantations of emerge flags. And eventually I show up the IRC channel with my tail between my legs.

Fortunately, the IRC community is extremely knowledgeable and can usually fix my problem in no time. But I hate having to ask for help, and I never seem to get closer to solving them myself.

The other major issue I have is convenience: it sometimes takes so long to install a new package. I get it - that's what you expect with a source-based distro. But man I did not understand just how much compiling time I'd need. Krita releases a new patch version? There's a couple hours with my laptop fans blasting. My laptop has easily spent 10x or 50x the time compiling Krita vs actually running it! And that's just one random program; god help you if you want Firefox on the same machine.

Anyway, on my next computer I'll probably install Arch.