On the night of March 23rd, I decided to retire my Gentoo experiment.

By all accounts the migration to Gentoo’s desktop/gnome/systemd profile and subsequent compilation of gnome-lite went well. However, as it dawned on me the degree to which I had simply built a less polished Fedora, the more I realized there was nothing left for the Gentoo challenge to prove.

Partly this decision rests on hardware. I own an Apple Studio Display, and I rather enjoy using it. The trouble is that without a thunderbolt display output on my desktop, GNOME would attempt to initialize the monitor, connected via a USB-C to DisplayPort adapter, at 2560x2880 - causing the display to appear blank. I was able to mitigate the issue with very janky scripts. But I could’ve never felt clean about that.

Partly it’s the nonsense that gets built alongside the metapackage. Is there some particular reason that Meson depends on qttools? And even if it does, must there be multiple Qt-related icons in my grid? Once again, I thought compilation from source was supposed to mean total control.

I am to a point now that if I feel like I’ve got something to prove, LFS is the correct venue for that. Running a systemd gentoo installation with a bunch of flatpaks - because, as previously mentioned, that is the security model - really only serves to prove that I enjoy compiling things. Which isn’t inaccurate. But that’s what I have GNOME Builder for.