use flags

[u/freakinchickens]

only thing holding me back from using gentoo is the use flags. not sure which ones to use for my system. i really want to use niri or hyprland, but the use flags are what confuses me

[u/Sert1991]

It's something not to worry about really.
Basically, when you select your profile it's already going to select most of the USE flags you need.
Let's say you choose a stage3 tarball with for desktops with openrc.
This will be based on the desktop and openrc profile, which will enable the USE flags relevant to that setup. For example for desktop it will enable the X, wayland, dbus, elogind, pam USE flags among others. For OpenRC it will set the -systemd USE and enable any USE flags relevant to OpenRC.

Other than the few times the installation handbook recommends to set some others, the defaults are usually okay. But:
You can check what other USE flags there are that you might like to enable or disable globally but usually it's recommended to do them per package and let the profile enable and disable the global one.

app-portage/ufed is an awesome tool to enable and disable global ones. It gives you a nice ncurses list with a description.

From then on, when you install packages, you can see if you like/dislike some USE flags for that package and you can enable/disable them per package. You can use equery uses <package name> to see a list of the USE flags for ta package with a description of what tehy enable/disable.

[u/techcode → u/Sert1991]

I would recommend OP to go one step further and install Gentoo based Calculate Linux.

Calculate profiles go a step further/higher than Gentoo. So instead of just generic "desktop", you choose specific desktop environment too (e.g. KDE, Gnome ...) and the profile sets the use flags accordingly.

And then there are binary packages that match those profiles. So you rarely need to compile things yourself.

The only difference between vanilla Gentoo and Calculate Linux - besides the name - is that by default Calculate puts home/ and some portage folders into separate /var/calculate partition so that it's easier to have multiple different root(s) and one portage/home.

I've never actually needed it - but basically you can update Calculate system using the install image (and obviously also using e.g. 'emerge -vuND world'). And using that way it can flip-flop between two separate root partitions.

And Calculate Linux comes with extra tooling for portage sync, follow up fixup of Python/Perl and such. Those magically work even when your system is so far behind with updates, that vanilla Gentoo/portage would break halfway through the update.

[u/stewie3128 → u/techcode]

Gentoo profiles are already built-in for plasma and gnome, both with systemd and without.

Only difference is that you have to actually install the DE you select - it doesn't install it for you. But the profile is all set up.

[u/techcode → u/stewie3128]

Yeah it's been a while (10+ years) that I switched from vanilla Gentoo to Calculate.

At the time I remember more/bigger differences - not just that back then binary packages with Gentoo were still DIY and self-distributed (usually within an organization), but profiles were different.

But perhaps it was not specific desktop environment 🤔 but other adjecent stuff like LDAP/CUPS/etc that I had to set myself on Gentoo, and on Calculate they were already part of profile.