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

Why Gentoo?

blogs.gentoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 85 posts

Re: Why Gentoo?

#11

Post by ajsnigrutin »

Gentoo is great!

You can just drop a patch into a folder, and every time you re/install or upgrade a package, it'll get applied!

You know that weird thing that bothers you in that specific software? That random popup when you start it? That additional, unneeded "ok" prompt? That donation-begging screen? That stupid checkmark checked on/off by default when it should be off/on instead?

Well, make a patch to fix it, drop it into /etc/portage/patches/// and it'll get applied automatically every time! And if it's truly a minor thing that bugs you, that patch will work for many new versions too!

(no, i'm not being paid by gentoo to promote them)

Re: Why Gentoo?

#12

Post by Gualdrapo »

hparadiz wrote: post #7

I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

And get rid of the bashims in OpenRC to make it posix-sh compliand while we're at that.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#14

Post by senectus1 »

I have fond memories of spending long nights recompiling with new flags to try and get slightly better FPS in games... this was over 25 years ago so not in the proton heyday we have now.

These days I'm a fair bit lazier, throw Fedora on and use it happily. update frequently and it almost never causes me any issues.

The Gentoo Forums were a super fun and friendly place back then, I hope they haven't lost that spirit.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#15

Post by wtallis »

nubinetwork wrote: post #2

I've been using Gentoo since 2003, and I don't really plan on changing any time soon... > We don’t go out of our way to tell you how to use your system I'm not really sure I believe this, because the default profiles do exactly that. One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock.

> One day you'll be happy with your pam config, then bam, package updates and you're forced into passwdqc and faillock.

Are you saying you've had your PAM config broken by a package update when you didn't update anything in /etc, or that you had your PAM config broken by a package update where you blindly accepted changes to stuff in /etc?

Re: Why Gentoo?

#16

Post by hparadiz »

collinfunk wrote: post #9
hparadiz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know for a fact that some stuff merged into Gentoo is already LLM modified in upstream so their stance is dumb and not even logically consistent.

Well, they have held back some slop in CPAN (a surprising place to find slop) [1]. Some of said slop recently caused GNU coreutils test suite to fail [2]. Surely the bot will get it right one day, right? [1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/971488 [2] https://github.com/cpan-authors/IO-Tty/issues/91

Python being a dependency of portage is gentoo's original sin. They have no business calling anything slop with how portage is coded. Truly the epitome of throwing bricks from a glass house.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#17

Post by tanderson92 »

hparadiz wrote: post #7

I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

There have existed portage replacements in C++ in the past. What you will find on reading the history is that personalities in the Gentoo community can play a more important role than technical excellence.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#20

Post by jayofdoom »

hparadiz wrote: post #6
aeonik wrote: post #3

I didn't realize how strict they were against LLMs. Codex has really helped my fix and tighten up my AUR PKGBUILDs. I was thinking about trying Gentoo in the future, but not being able to contribute because I use LLMs in my workflow sucks.

I know for a fact that some stuff merged into Gentoo is already LLM modified in upstream so their stance is dumb and not even logically consistent.

It's pretty consistent. If you check out something from a Gentoo-official repo, it's going to have been created by humans without the use of LLM tooling. LLM tooling is used for the kernel, systemd, and a litany of other packages -- trying to run a "non-LLM OS" is more like a fork of the whole ecosystem than a distribution.

I can appreciate the concept that Gentoo is placing a high value on human curation. I used to be firmly against our anti-LLM policy, but honestly it's a pretty strong differentiator from other distributions -- and I'm getting more and more sick of AI tech in general.

(note: I am a Gentoo developer)

Post reply on HN