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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#101

Post by ghaff »

cyberpunk wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well Red Hat did make a go at a supported enterprise desktop distro for a time and, as I wrote, Fedora--which Red Hat supports in a variety of ways for various purposes--is pretty much my default Linux distro.

So I'm not being critical. Yes, Red Hat employees do contribute to projects that are most relevant to the desktop even if doing so is not generally really the focus of their day jobs. And, no, other companies almost certainly haven't done more.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#102

Post by Zambyte »

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.

The Nix documentation is what drove me away from it years ago when I tried. I ended up landing on GNU Guix, where I have been for about 5 years now. I found the OS documentation to be much nicer (info pages!) and the decades of Scheme documentation makes the language easier to pick up too.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#103

Post by blaerk »

arendtio wrote: post #77
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…

I think it is a great learning opportunity, but after using Gentoo for a decade or so, I prefer Arch these days. So if you want to learn more about Linux and its ecosystems, go for it, do it for a few months or years. That said, I haven't tried Gentoo with binaries from official repositories yet. Maybe that makes it less time-consuming to keep your system up to date.

Been happily and very successfully using the official binpkgs, it works really well, sometimes there's a slight delay for the binary versions of the source packages to appear in the repositories, but that's about it. I guess it's kind of running Arch, but with portage <3! And the occasional compilation because your use flags didn't really match the binaries

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#104

Post by Thaxll »

CursedSilicon wrote: post #84
Philpax wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...is Gentoo large and influential these days? As far as I'm aware, its current cultural status is that of a punchline, but I'm open to being corrected.

Gentoo's Portage build system is (or at least was?) part of Google's ChromeOS Gentoo also runs the backend infra of Sony's Playstation Cloud gaming service Anecdotal evidence claims it used to also run the NASDAq

Highly unlikely that PSN runs Gentoo. They're using AWS.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#105

Post by allreduce »

Cyph0n wrote: post #52
plagiarist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.

It’s even more pleasant when you use a distro that natively uses systemd and provides light abstractions on top. One such example is NixOS.

NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).

Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.

Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#106

Post by bicolao »

BeetleB wrote: post #63

Been running it for over 20 years: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/ Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989311 Edit: Curious, why the downvote?

I'm more amazed you run the same machine for 20 years. Another 20+ years user, but I've reinstalled 5-6 times when I change laptops.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#107

Post by MarsIronPI »

f1shy wrote: post #70
MarsIronPI wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g. - systemd - pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC) - Wayland - Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)

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.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#108

Post by humanrebar »

shevy-java wrote: post #36
Etheryte wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

Red Hat employs a significant number of GCC core devs.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#109

Post by MarsIronPI »

cyberpunk wrote: post #95
ghaff wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop?

To some extent Valve. They have to, since the Steam Deck's desktop experience depends on the "Linux desktop" being a good experience.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#110

Post by BeetleB »

bicolao wrote: post #106
BeetleB wrote: post #63

Been running it for over 20 years: https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/ Prior HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35989311 Edit: Curious, why the downvote?

I'm more amazed you run the same machine for 20 years. Another 20+ years user, but I've reinstalled 5-6 times when I change laptops.

No, I changed the machine, but just installed Gentoo every time. I merely kept the emerge.logs from each machine.
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