This is a remarkably small number given that Gentoo Portage is load bearing infrastructure under ChromeOS.
just typical corporate open source bloodsucking
Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
91–100 of 204 posts
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#92How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?
TLDR: Installation is a pain, initial configuration is a pain and there's always something more to tweak, update is a lesser pain, but still a pain. But it's fun, BDSM-style...
Installation is done by booting a liveCD, manually partitioning your storage, unpacking a Gentoo STAGE3 archive, chrooting in it, doing basic configuration such as network, timezone, portage (package manager) base profile and servers, etc., compiling and installing a kernel and then rebooting into the new system.
Then you get to play with /etc/portage/make.conf which is the root configuration of the package manager. You get to set CPU instruction sets (CPU_FLAGS), gcc CFLAGS flags, MAKE flags, video card targets, acceptable package licenses, global USE flags (those are simplified ./configure arguments that usually apply to several packages), which Apache modules get built, which qemu targets get built, etc. These are all env vars that portage (the package manager) uses to build packages for your system.
The more you use Gentoo, the more features of make.conf you discover. Never ending fun.
Then, you start installing packages and updates (same procedure):
1) You start the update by reviewing USE flags for each added/updated package - several screens of dense text.
For example, PHP has these USE flags: https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-lang/php - mouse hover to see what they do. You get to play with them in /etc/portage/package.use and there's no end to tweaking them.
If you have any form of OCD, stay away from Gentoo or this will be your poison forever!
2) Then the compilation begins and that takes hours or days depending on what you install and uses a lot of CPU and either storage I/O or memory (if you have lots of memory, you can compile in a tmpfs a lot faster).
I'm not sure it is OK to compile the updates on a live server, especially during busy hours, but Gentoo has alternatives, including binary packages (recently added, but must match your USE flags with theirs), building packages remotely on another system (distcc), even on a different arch (crossdev). You could run an ARM server and build packages for it on a x86 workstation. I didn't use "steve", so I can't tell you what wonderful things that tool can do, yet.
3) Depending on architecture, some less used packages may fail to compile. You get to manually debug that and submit bug reports. You can also add patches to /etc/portage/patches/ that will automatically be applied when the package is built, and that includes the kernel.
I recommend you to run emerge with --keep-going to have the package manager continue after an error with the remaining packages.
4) When each package is done compiling, it's installed automatically. There are no automatic reboots or anything. The files are replaced live, both executables and libraries. Running services continue to use old files from memory until you restart them or reboot manually - they will appear red/yellow in htop until you do.
There were a few times, very very few, when I had crashes in new packages that were succesfuly built. It only happened on armv7, which is a practically abandoned platform everywhere. In those cases you can revert to the old ones and mask the bugged version to prevent it from being updated to next time.
5) Last step is to review the config changes. dispatch-conf will present a diff of all proposed changes to .ini and .cfg files for all updated packages. You get to review, accept, reject the changes or manually edit the files.
That's all. Simple. :)
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is, in a way, why it's nice that we have companies like Red Hat, SUSE and so on. Even if you might not like their specific distros for one reason or another, they've found a way to make money in a way where they contribute back for everything they've received. Most companies don't do that.
Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.
Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?
Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.
If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red Hat contributes a huge amount to the open source ecosystem. They're one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel (maybe the biggest).
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo... It looks like they're second to Intel, at least by LF's metric. That said driver code tends to be take up a lot of space compared to other areas. Just look at the mass of AMD template garbage here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Intel has long been a big contributor--mostly driver stuff as I understand it. (Intel does a lot more software work than most people realize.) Samsung was pretty high on the list at one point as well. My grad school roommate (now mostly retired though he keeps his hand in) was in the top 10 individual list at one point--mostly for networking-related stuff.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.
I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.
Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop? Over the years i’m pretty sure redhat contributed a great deal to various desktop projects, can’t think of anyone who contributed more.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that would be nice but when I look at their Grub src.rpm for instance, some of those patches would look original but came from Debian. Back in the day when the boxes were on display in brick-and-mortar stores, SuSE was a great way to get up and running with Linux.
SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool. It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender. The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed)…
SUSE has a lot of ex-Red Hatters at high levels these days. Their CEO ran Asia-Pacific for a long time and North America commercial sales for a shorter period.
SUSE has always been pretty big in Europe but never was that prominent in North America except for IBM mainframes, which Red Hat chipped away at over time. (For a period, SUSE supported some mainframe features that Red Hat didn't--probably in part because some Red Hat engineering leadership was at least privately dismissive of the whole idea of running Linux on mainframes.)
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#97This is a remarkably small number given that Gentoo Portage is load bearing infrastructure under ChromeOS.
And the NASDAQ[0]
[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/481872/how_linux_mastered_wa...
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#98How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?
General administration is similar to Arch or any other regular distro. Package updates necessarily take longer because of recompiling but that's just CPU time. There are precompiled versions of big popular binaries (open office, Firefox, etc) that allow you to save a lot of time if you want. Where you lose time is in trying to optimize your system and packages using the multiple switches that Gentoo provides. If you'…
I don't understand the time sink. Isn't spending time knowing intricate details about your system a good thing? You know better than most if you've gone that deep.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#99How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?
TLDR: Installation is a pain, initial configuration is a pain and there's always something more to tweak, update is a lesser pain, but still a pain. But it's fun, BDSM-style... Installation is done by booting a liveCD, manually partitioning your storage, unpacking a Gentoo STAGE3 archive, chrooting in it, doing basic configuration such as network, timezone, portage (package manager) base profile and servers, etc., co…
That's a very well painted picture for what to expect. I am gonna try it soon, since it's been on my task list for too long. Thanks :)
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#100I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags correctly it produced heavily tailored an…
45 minutes hah, it used to take us three days to build kde ;)