I’m not a fan of big distros. The idea of a debian that uses sysinit or Open RC appealed. But the borg has spoken, and such will not exist.

@DevuanOrg @debian Time to switch to gentoo, then.

— Chris Gale (@pukeko60) January 23, 2016

The first thing to do is download an iso. Now, I have done a raw gentoo install before. But on UEFI hardware I get stuck. Much easier to use one of the automagic Gentoo Live CDs. Now, this is where it gets tricky, because the most useful of these in my hands is Sabayon.

Why Sabayon? Well, the install works. Including the minimal one.

Back up your data. (Use a big USB hard disk. Let it run)

Download the minimal iso, burn to CD, and boot. Do an install.

Then… I would add lxqt.

 equo install --ask lxqt-meta 

After that you are building your own machine. Your mileage will vary. I generally want libreoffice, darktable, a browser (I am using vivaldi in preference to Midori, which comes with lxqt) and an email client — Kmail is probably the best non mozilla one, though it brings a fair amount of KDE with it.

For fun, add gnome screenshot and cheese…

and if you want statistics, may I recommend rkward.

Please note that I am avoiding mozilla. I miss thunderbird (evolution is not as good) and there are other good browsers. But this gives me a working system on the test laptop. Let’s leave it on for a few months and see if this minimal system beats fedora.

UPDATE

1. Systemd has invaded Sabayon. The use of openRC has just been depreciated. Will explore Manjaro and see if they have a live DVD that works.
2. For email, I suggest Claws Mail. It can handle scripts for most email clients
3. If you want pretty geary. Yes, it runs Gnome. But it does work for the big servers such as google and yahoo.
4. For social media, consider moving to Ello. Much more inspiring stuff there. Keep Facebook for sharing Crossfit and Grandkid photos