“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.

Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.

Looks like mid-to-high-level difficulty if you really want to build from source, due to multiple complex interdependent configuration flags that have to match your hardware, and the need to check a kernel option or two. (Based on the Gentoo ebuild for mesa 24.1.2).

Red Hat’s interests often don’t seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It’s the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they’re a for-profit corporation).

It’s the sort of thing that many people won’t really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.

Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt to rpm, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.

(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)

Ships with Gentoo by default, since you actually need a nongraphical editor there and nano is easier to learn than vi or emacs.