User:Arch dude
Hi!. I have been a Gentoo user since about 2004. I am a fairly casual user, and I sometimes let my setup get stale. I ended up doing a re-install on 2011-12-26, using no masked packages -- we'll see how this works out.
My system has an nVidia GTX 8800, so I use the nvidia drivers. This has been a major pain in the posterior on several occasions.
I usually use Gnome.
In the past I have managed to install and use the Xilinx tool suite as the basis for hobbist-level experiments on Xilinx FPGAs.
I am interested in Blender.
2011-12-26 installation notes
When I built my system in 2008-12-20, I left an empty 250GB partition on my 1TB disk. I built a new Gentoo on this partition today, using old system to create the image on the new partition. The old system still had network and disk connectivity and text console, but no GUI due to an emerge nightmare. The new install was uneventful: Gentoo installs are getting easier. I installed X and xfce.
After trying xfce, I decided to install Gnome: I'm more comfortable with it even though is quite heavy. I followed the manual. As it happend, the manual is slightly out of date: you must add "python" and "sqlite" to your USE flags before you can "emerge gnome"
2017-03-01 installation
I started over after again letting my old system get too stale. this time, I used a VivoMini 6500U (core i7 Skylake) with 16 GB DDR4 and a 1TB M.2 SSD.
UEFI boot, GPT partitions, Gnome. The installation notes for UEFI in the handbook are very poor. Specifically, they do not mention that a system cannot build a UEFI boot SSD unless the system itself is booted from UEFI. Therefore, you cannot start from the minimal livecd. After much frustration, I managed to install the boot by using the Systemrescue CD image, which you can install UEFI-bootable on a USB stick.
Since I had 3 monitors lying around, I set the system up to drive all three of them (2 on the displayport and one on the HDMI). I( am still struggling with audio, but all else is good.