It natively require you to compile the kernel

Nitpick: precompiled kernels are now available as sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin, but you certainly can build your own (I’ve done that for two new machines in the past six months).

“sysrescuecd” which is based on gentoo

It used to be, but isn’t anymore. Try booting the Gentoo minimal install image for your arch instead.

Call me weird, but the cursors are just about the only visual element of my desktop that I don’t customize. Boring default X cursors all the way!

I doubt they could even run a modern OS with a light DE.

They could, actually—it’s been about a year since I retired a machine with specs as bad or worse that ran Gentoo with TDE, and it was useful enough for many things. Web browsing was not one of those things, however.

Unless you deliberately set out to compile a minimalistic custom kernel, less than half of them. Problem is, you may not be able to easily tell which half.

I think you might be able to deactivate this one by turning off XFRM support in a custom-configured kernel, at the cost of losing some types of tunneling. Not going to actually test that, though.

Evidently they’ve never visited one of those suburban subdivisions in their own country where all of the houses are built to the same blueprint. Same effect, slightly different scale.

The largest one is probably the lack of churn. I don’t have to relearn what things look like or how controls function every few years (or where settings have migrated to, or how to accomplish random-obscure-thing-I-might-need-to-do-once-a-year). It lets me get on with whatever I sat down at the computer to do in the first place, which was almost certainly not tinkering with the DE.

It’s also light on resources, since it dates to the days when a single core and 1GB RAM was considered a pretty decent system.

(Note that TDE, which is what I am using, is still well-maintained—it’s just that the people working on it consider keeping the original look and feel to be one of their goals.)

A dislike of minimalistic interfaces is not the only reason that I am using twenty-plus-year-old styling (older than Oxygen, even) on a DE of the same vintage, but it is one minor reason.

Real checkboxes can also take effect immediately, and have much better visual cues. The submit button was intended to save older computers the extra monitoring load of having to keep track of the state of every control all the time—it has nothing to do with control styling.

Actually, you don’t even need Redmond in the equation, just normal media shenanigans. Doomsday warnings sell more newspapers ad impressions than “Minor security issue here, patch when available.”

I’ve encountered a couple of people who use them as remote cameras to observe their 3D printers. That suggests a bunch of other possibilities for things you want to be able to watch or listen to without standing over them and without buying an extra webcam to cover what might be a temporary need.

Hmm? Unless you’re trying to run the most recent build of Gnome, the set of software that actually requires systemd is pretty small. There’s a list somewhere on the Gentoo wiki. What exactly are you having problems with?

In Firefox, I don’t remember having something similar. That was like 5+ years ago, I believe profiles were there, but perhaps less easy to use.

The profiles feature in Firefox haa been there for a long, long time—more than a decade, and possibly longer than Chrome has existed—but not many people read the documentation to find the command-line switch to evoke the selector, and they’ve never been terribly easy to find from inside the GUI.

Well, it often feels like every “Linux security issue” flagged in the tech press is a privilege escalation, but I admit that I haven’t sat down and done the math.

Exactly. It’s Yet Another Privilege Escalation Vulnerability. Unless you’re dealing with a multiuser machine, the attacker first needs to use some other vuln to get into an unprivileged account. Without that additional vulnerability, this exploit is useless.

We don’t talk about 1997. It might hear. 😱

As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it’s perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.

Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn’t contain it). You’ll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.

Good luck.

If using OpenRC is all it tales to be on the dark side, then I’ve been there since before it was cool.

It has better specs than the 2008 laptop I retired last year (I was running Gentoo on that, but I don’t entirely recommend that unless you’re experienced with Gentoo and know what kind of setup to go with). Anyway, SNES emulation is less demanding than running a modern web browser, so your little beastie should be fine for that.

Eudev wasn’t spun up and then maintained for several years for no reason (it spun down again as the pressure dropped off). And you still can’t get the udev source from upstream as a separate tarball—you have to download the entire systemd tarball, even if you don’t want any of the rest of the contents.