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

Gentoo goes Binary

gentoo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 285 posts

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#111

Post by znpy »

jasoneckert wrote: post #105

Back in the 2000s I would spend immense amounts of time compiling custom Gentoo on old SGI MIPS systems to obtain the best performance. However, even back then I remember thinking that as computing power evolved, there would be a point where Gentoo would either fade into obscurity, or release binary packages to allow users to quickly set up the distribution. As a result, I'm not surprised by this announcement in the…

> Back in the 2000s I would spend immense amounts of time compiling custom Gentoo on old SGI MIPS systems to obtain the best performance.

I'm curious, did you ran benchmarks? What kind of performance gains did you get, if you got any?

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#112

Post by Maken »

bee_rider wrote: post #92
adrian_b wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For less powerful devices it has always been possible to install Gentoo in a chroot directory on a powerful computer, using a configuration appropriate for the less powerful device, compile and install in the chroot environment any packages, and then just copy all the files from the chroot directory, through Ethernet or using a USB memory, over the root HDD/SSD of the less powerful device. I have used Gentoo in this…

Next you’ll tell me there are optimization settings other than -mtune=native

Never forget -Ofast.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#113

Post by the_af »

gavinhoward wrote: post #86

Wow...I feel weird. A lot of the comments are saying that they tried Gentoo or used to use it. And here I am, using it as my daily driver and server workhorse. I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. And I am not going to enable binary packages.

> I wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me.

Ok, I'll bite: why is Gentoo best for you? (I'm not going to try to refute any of your statements should you reply, I promise. I'm genuinely curious.)

I'll offer my own experience why Gentoo is not for me: I don't run my own server, and at work I use servers in the cloud (Ubuntu based, I guess? Or AWS-flavored). No compiling any kernels or whatnot.

For the desktop, a friend convinced me to try Gentoo 10+ years ago ("it's compiled for your specific hardware, it'll be faster!"), I gave it a try, wasted lots of time getting it running, then saw it wasn't really noticeably faster for any task I did than regular Ubuntu, and took longer to get set up. So I ditched it.

Another common claim I found to be false (in my case): "I learned so much configuring Gentoo!". Well, no. I mostly followed the recipes like almost everybody else, setting flags and touching config files I didn't really understand, so I can safely say I learned nothing -- I just went through the motions.

But that's just my experience.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#114

Post by calvinmorrison »

mad182 wrote: post #8
iamgopal wrote: post #3

Years ago, somehow, I wasted hours and days of computer and my time, compiling and fine tuning my gentoo system, god knows why, when next day I anyway format it to install newly arrived Ubuntu cd.

I too used to obsess over customizing my OS. Now I just install Debian, a handful of programs I use daily and that's it. I can recreate my setup on another machine in 20 minutes.

They talk about the shell as an IDE. My entire desktop is a 14 year experiment in tuning productivity. My ~/bin/ folder has around 100 scripts and maybe 20 are little scripts i wrote in conjunction with i3. Pretty cool how it stacks up over time

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#115

Post by jasoneckert »

znpy wrote: post #111
jasoneckert wrote: post #105

Back in the 2000s I would spend immense amounts of time compiling custom Gentoo on old SGI MIPS systems to obtain the best performance. However, even back then I remember thinking that as computing power evolved, there would be a point where Gentoo would either fade into obscurity, or release binary packages to allow users to quickly set up the distribution. As a result, I'm not surprised by this announcement in the…

> Back in the 2000s I would spend immense amounts of time compiling custom Gentoo on old SGI MIPS systems to obtain the best performance. I'm curious, did you ran benchmarks? What kind of performance gains did you get, if you got any?

I didn't run any formal benchmarks back then, but the performance I would get was on par with the fastest x86 and x86_64 machines I had running Linux in the mid 2000s. For example, I would bring an SGI O2 with an R5000 CPU into my classroom running Gentoo with Fluxbox and let the students play with it. They would often comment about how fast it browsed the web and connected to our campus file and RDP servers, and were shocked when I told them the CPU only ran at 150Mhz!

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#116

Post by mid-kid »

adrian_b wrote: post #89
mid-kid wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me this is great news for less powerful devices I use that I don't feel like setting up a binrepo for (especially when it involves cross-compilation), but still want to reuse my portage config and custom ebuilds for.

For less powerful devices it has always been possible to install Gentoo in a chroot directory on a powerful computer, using a configuration appropriate for the less powerful device, compile and install in the chroot environment any packages, and then just copy all the files from the chroot directory, through Ethernet or using a USB memory, over the root HDD/SSD of the less powerful device. I have used Gentoo in this…

I know this, I mentioned this as "setting up a binrepo" in my comment, as I think the binrepo approach makes more sense (esp. with regards to easy updates).

It's just an unwieldy amount of extra overhead, disk space, and time, which I'd rather avoid, especially for devices I'm not fully committed to maintaining over a long period. I've tried what you mention, it's just never convenient enough to be worth the pain.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#117

Post by phh »

dordoka wrote: post #82
phh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanna talk about JS? Java?

Contrary to popular belief, Java is amongst the most efficient languages regarding power consumption.

I was referencing directly the amount of compilation, not necessarily the power consumption. But with regards to ecological impact, I would guess you have Java on a server in your mind.

But, the biggest Java user in term of number of devices is Android. And every time you install an app, you compile it. Including every time you update it (which nowadays is... everyday?). Also it'll recompile in background to use pgo. Nowadays [1] Google could pretty much compile it server-side for most devices, and save a lot of battery wear (batteries wear when getting hot, and compiling, weirdly, heats), in addition to power consumption.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#118

Post by Maken »

iamgopal wrote: post #3

Years ago, somehow, I wasted hours and days of computer and my time, compiling and fine tuning my gentoo system, god knows why, when next day I anyway format it to install newly arrived Ubuntu cd.

I never used gentoo. Making sure the graphic and wifi card in a laptop worked after every upddate on Ubuntu was hard enough for me.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#120

Post by teekert »

jstummbillig wrote: post #21
teekert wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and me both. But, we learned a lot. Nowadays I feel like Linux is my super power, OS, VM, Container, Nix-shell, WSL2. It’s all Linux. And you can drop me on any command line (even a BSD one to some extent) and I will feel at home and can solve problems. I’d like to think that’s where my happy time with Gentoo led to.

And no matter if its true (and it might well be!) the overarching tendency to look for reasons to explain time spent with Gentoo should probably tell us something. At best, we are at least a bit confused about it all.

I had fun.
Post reply on HN