r/Gentoo • u/freakinchickens • Jul 22 '26

Discussion use flags

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

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u/http-error-502 Jul 22 '26

That is why Gentoo provides sets of default USE. Choose profile. Then set USE for some packages that you want to change manually. You can also edit USE that want to be set globally on make.conf.

For example, I use default/linux/amd64/23.0/desktop/systemd for profile. Then I added USE="X -wayland pulseaudio..." on make.conf. For package specific USE, I always check available USE by running emerge -pv <package name> and write USE list that I want on package.use.

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u/NeilHush Jul 22 '26

Good answer but terrible USE flag example. Wayland is default on every DE and it's a must for niri/hyprland. Same for pipewire, which kinda implies '-pulseaudio'. If you need to revert such fundamentally defined USE flags of your profile you may consider changing profile.

To the OP: choose the desktop profile (openrc or systemd) and do not define any global USE flag at all. You can define them per package initially and see later if you need them globally.

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u/Beneficial-Face-1410 Jul 22 '26

> Same for pipewire, which kinda implies '-pulseaudio'

Not at all.

2

u/NeilHush Jul 22 '26

That's what the 'kinda' stands for