Tonight, my war with Gentoo ended. Although it had proved a worthy opponent over the last few months, I finally had to destroy it, wiping it out in response to its most recent attack.

Of late, Gentoo had been blockading me from my disks, preventing me from accessing any disk not already mounted once it fully booted. Thanks to how my booting process was configured, this prevented me from accessing my boot partition - and I needed update my kernel. But this was not the blow which settled the matter, not by a long shot.

Upon returning home from college today, after a rather long day I might add, I went to boot up this Gentoo machine. And boot up it did - although I noticed that Alsa had failed to load, committing one of the unforgivable transgressions that my operating system can commit against me by breaking audio. But even this was not the action that would prove fatal for Gentoo. . .

Once booted, I logged into to the console (I start in console, not in X). Then I typed that fateful command, startx, and Gentoo committed the worst of transgressions. It failed to start X, giving only the information that no screens had been found, and that the nvidia module had failed to load.

And then I saw it all in a rush, saw the truth behind its actions. It was trying to absorb every second of my free time, taking away from other activities, both related to my classwork and my own personal hobbies. Its refusal to allow me to install new modules by hiding the boot partition from me, the way it wouldn’t detect USB devices for so long, the refusal to let me work with my Ardunio. And now, committing the unspeakable horror, an action that would force me to plumb the Lovecraftian depths of the X Windows system, and I knew that all but one path was closed to me.

It was time to install a new distribution.

So, farewell, you odd little penguin Gentoo. It’s now time to install that jaunty little hat, Fedora. Maybe one day I will return to explore your mysterious ways, but now is not that day.