How to update Gentoo's profile

There are 2 ways to upgrade Gentoo’s profile: whether by using the program eselect, or by manual linking.

Firstly the portage tree needs to be updated to get the latest profile list by running the following command;

$ sudo emerge --sync

The following example is to update using eselect;

$ sudo eselect profile list
$ sudo eselect profile set <number>

Where number is the number of the favored profile from the list.

To manually update the profile, delete the softlink and create a new link to the intended profile as the following (be sure not to add / at the end of /etc/make.profile)

$ sudo rm /etc/make.profile
$ sudo ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/<profile of choice> /etc/make.profile

Optionally, in the end, you might want to upgrade the system using the new profile;

$ sudo emerge --sync
$ sudo emerge --update --newuse --deep world