I got screwed one time really hard with emerge. I didn’t update for a long time and it was messed up enough that I couldn’t install anything due to python issues and I also couldn’t update due to python issues and there were circular dependencies. Experienced people on the Gentoo discord tried and failed to help me get that fixed without an os reinstall but all efforts were ultimately unsuccessful.

This was on a slow as molasses Athlon XP so reinstalling Gentoo was completely out of the question. Since Gentoo was basically the only thing that would run on that cpu, I got a different motherboard from ebay instead.

I’m about to get a chance to try it on a different pc (M5A am3 with a Titan X), but on a x79 motherboard and a 1080ti, that doesn’t work. After installing that, I do get the Nvidia x server but when I open the program, it’s an empty window and something is obviously broken. I installed Arch on the same pc and it was even easier to get Nvidia drivers working than on Ubuntu.

It’s a lot harder to get Nvidia drivers working on Debian than any other distro I’ve tried including Arch. Every issue besides that one I’ve ever had in Debian, I was able to fix.

Should I use Fedora for a home server? I like stuff not breaking randomly after updates which makes Gentoo and Arch kind of a meh choice. Debian is so committed to foss that it’s harder to get drivers working/a lot less stuff works out of the box. On a new enough laptop with all it’s weird chipset drivers, it’s harder to get Debian working than Arch in my experience. I’ve never successfully got Nvidia drivers working on Debian for example.

Normally home servers run bog standard older hardware so using Debian isn’t a problem but I want to install an Nvidia card for ai stuff.

I think I got up to 300 or so days on my old Athlon XP Gentoo server. I have “upgraded” since then and my current server can’t go more than 2 days. I have an arduino connected to the motherboards reset button pin that resets it whenever the bash script that communicates with the arduino stops running but even that somehow still crashes at least once a week and needs manual intervention.