Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

gentoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 204 posts

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#171

Post by malwrar »

scorpioxy wrote: post #140
malwrar wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, first time I’ve mentioned it anywhere. Happy to answer questions, if there’s interest maybe this could be my reason for a first blog post.

I would encourage you to write about it as well. It seems interesting and unconventional. I used to tinker a lot with my systems but as I gotten older and my time became more limited, I've abandoned a lot of it and now favor "getting things done". Though I still tinker a lot with my systems and have my workflow and system setup, it is no longer at the level of re-compiling the kernel with my specific optimization sor…

> It feels like containerfiles are an easier approach but they(at least docker does) sort of feel designed around describing application environments as opposed to full system environments.

They absolutely are! I actually originally just wanted a base container image for running services on my hosts that a.) I could produce a full source code listing for and b.) have full visibility over the BoM, and realized I could just ‘FROM scratch’ & pull in gentoo’s stage3 to basically achieve that. That also happens to be the first thing you do in a new gentoo chroot, and I realized that pretty much every step in the gentoo install media that you run after (installing software, building the kernel, setting up users, etc) could also be run in the container. What are containers if not “portable executable chroots” after all? My first version of this build system was literally to then copy / on the container to a mounted disk I manually formatted. Writing to disk is actually the most unnatural part of this whole setup since no one really has a good solution for doing this without using the kernel; I used to format and mount devices directly in a privileged container but now I just boot a qemu VM in an unprivileged container and do it in an initramfs since I was already building those manually too. I found while iterating on this that all of the advantages you get from Containerfiles (portability, repeatability, caching, minimal host runtime, etc) naturally translated over to the OS builder project, and since I like deploying services as containers anyways there’s a high degree of reuse going on vs needing separate tools and paradigms everywhere.

I’ll definitely write it up and post it to HN at some point, trying to compact the whole project in just that blurb felt painful.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#172

Post by f1shy »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #107
f1shy wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know where they come from, but I try to avoid all in that list. To be fair, audio is a train wreck anyway.

Eh, pulseaudio got a lot better, and pipewire "just works" at this point (at least for me). Even Bluetooth audio works OOTB most of the time.

Maybe. The background of my comment: in the end of 90's I worked in a company doing professional audio in windows. We had multiple cards, with multiple inputs and outputs, different sampling frequencies, channels, bits per sample... The API was trivial. I learned it in 1 hour.

FF to last year, I was working with OpenGL (in linux), I thought "I will add sound" boy... I was smashed by the zoo of APIs, subsystems one on top of another, lousy documentation... Audio, which for me was WAY easier as video, suddenly was way more complicated. From the userland POV, last year I also wanted to make a kind of BT speaker with a raspeberry pi, and also was terrible experience.

So, I don't know... maybe I should give a try to pipewire, at the time I was done after fighting with alsa and pulseaudio, the first problem I killed it.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#173

Post by forgotpwd16 »

mirpa wrote: post #88
entropie wrote: post #20

2025 I switched to nixos and will probably stay. I used gentoo for like 20 years. Its the distro of my heart. With some notebooks, some of which were getting on in years, it was simply too resource-intensive to update. Only GHC, for example, often took 12+ hours to compile on some older notebooks.

I tried to list available packages on NixOS and nix-env consumed more than 6 GB Ram. Everyone told me not to use nix-env; everyone except NixOS manual. Trying to understand NixOS environment is a deep rabbit hole.

Yeah, it's in a weird state of officially being stuck to legacy channels/profiles and unofficially having moved to flakes. Excessive RAM usage with nix-env, which theoretically can be improved but requires deep design changes, was what driven me to flakes.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#174

Post by pjjpo »

As a kid 25+ years ago, it was fun tweaking use flags, compiling with Intel cc, diving into every menu in that blue kernel configuration screen. System recompiles I think took 4 hours back then. Learned so much back then and it can even be useful to this day, I don't think I'd even know what a glibc is without tweaking out it's use flags just for kicks.

Now I am happily gaming on arch Linux and while generally developing on a Mac, need to jump into debian in docker and such. But I do hope kids these days end up trying Gentoo, the hacker skillset it builds is priceless. No offense to adults still using it! I just hope there aren't as many "my system doesn't build anymore" situations as I remember.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#175

Post by pjmlp »

malwrar wrote: post #57

Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardw…

After driving Gentoo for a while back in 2004, I decided I don't really want to wait compiling for everything.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#176

Post by nticompass »

I used to use Gentoo, it helped me learn Linux and I loved it. Waiting for things to compile took a while, but I learned about distcc and set up another machine to help the compiling! I don't use Gentoo anymore, since I don't really have the time anymore to deal with it - like having to fix compile issues - but it did feel really cool to have my system custom-tuned just for me.

(I use Fedora, btw)

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#177

Post by ghaff »

hobobaggins wrote: post #166
cyberpunk wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Canonical. at least they used to, although not a fan of the recent (last ten years) Canonical.

Certainly, Ubuntu used to be friendlier to new would-be Linux desktop users for a variety of reasons. (And we could get into some controversial decisions/directions it's taken but I won't.) I'm sure lots of people still run Ubuntu although Canonical is less prominent these days. My impression is that Canonical was sort of a passion project of Mark Shuttleworth's and they're just a lot lower key at this point.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#178

Post by snvzz »

Y_Y wrote: post #3

> The Gentoo Foundation took in $12,066 in fiscal year 2025 (ending 2025/06/30); the dominant part (over 80%) consists of individual cash donations from the community. On the SPI side, we received $8,471 in the same period as fiscal year 2025; also here, this is all from small individual cash donations. It's crazy how projects this large and influential can get by on so little cash. Of course a lot of people are dona…

A small amount of money goes a long way when not wasted in DEI programs.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#179

Post by techcode »

pjmlp wrote: post #175
malwrar wrote: post #57

Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardw…

After driving Gentoo for a while back in 2004, I decided I don't really want to wait compiling for everything.

For those that don't want to wait compiling for everything - https://www.calculate-linux.org/

It's still 100% pure Gentoo (and actually these days even vanilla Gentoo itself offers precompiled binaries) so you still can compile things in rare cases that binary isn't already compiled with use/config that you want.

Post reply on HN