I sometimes get tired of Gentoo. Those times are usually right about when I hear about some new application, and decide I really want to try it out, and then I realize it's going to take 2 hours to install it. Or when I want to try out the newest release of Gnome/KDE and I realize I won't even be able to begin using it until it finishes compiling tomorrow night. Gentoo isn't a "try stuff out and see what you like" kind of distro. If not due to how long it takes to install things, then for how hard it is to uninstall things.

Which brings me to my other senseless gripe... I have over 600 packages installed, and that's mostly because there's no sane way I know of to uninstall things safely without breaking other things. I'm sure there are ways of keeping track of what's safe to be removed and what isn't. For example people hand-manage their world files. But what's the point of having a package manager if the package manager itself has to be micromanaged? I have so much crap in my world file that I can't even remember whether half of it is something I want/need or not. Sure, you can --oneshot to keep stuff out of the world file. But how do I even know I'm putting the right things into my world file? I use a general philosophy "Only put applications in there; don't put libraries". But that distinction is something I made up out of my arse, and half the time I'm not even sure how to make that distinction. I don't know all there is to know about every single one of the packages I install, and it seems like I'd almost have to know that to get Portage working smoothly.

Sometime in the past year www-misc/htdig ended up in my world file. What the heck is htdig? Did I specifically emerge this to fix something that was broken? Oh look, it's app-arch/rpm2targz. I have a good idea what that is, but why the heck is it installed? Maybe I should start keeping a journal? Hmm, sys-boot/grub is in my world file. If I remove it, will it stay installed? I imagine, but is it worth the hours of hassle fixing things if I'm wrong? I can easily look up what these things are, but doing that for the hundreds packages in my world file doesn't seem like a good time to me. And why should I have to?

There's always --depclean, but search for depclean on the Gentoo forums and behold the carnage it has meted out on the unwary. I have had it fail to run, or outright destroy my system, too many times to even bother trying it. I'm sure I'm not the only one. It's always great when you start with a big red message saying essentially "Check to make sure you aren't uninstalling vital system apps by mistake, thus rendering your system unusable! Whoops! This command is so dangerous and unlikely to work correctly that it will refuse to run unless you force it! Tee hee!" And there are scores of mostly unmaintained hacked up versions of --depclean that supposedly work better, but no, I think I'll pass there.

So I find it "safer" never to uninstall anything that remotely looks like something else might be using it. Which basically means I hardly ever uninstall anything at all. The advantage is that my computer works. The disadvantage is that it's stupid and lazy and messy and inefficient and I have 600+ packages installed. One of Gentoo's strengths is that nothing is installed unless you install it. One of it's weaknesses is that I'm too stupid to know precisely which of the 600 packages on my system are the ones I need to have installed to get Amarok and Opera and gVim etc. to work, and I don't have a month to figure it out.

I use Gentoo because it still works better than (so far as I know) anything else. I'm using x86_64 so my options are a bit slimmer than they would normally be anyways. Gentoo does work (usually), it's just not pretty.