131–140 of 285 posts
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Wanna talk about JS? Java?
Contrary to popular belief, Java is amongst the most efficient languages regarding power consumption.
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 whatno…
I can understand that you didn't learn anything from installing Gentoo. I did, but in my case, I was not like most new Linux users; instead of immediately trying to learn the details when I started, I just wanted to install Ubuntu and get working.
It was only six years later that I installed Arch, then Linux from Scratch, then Gentoo, and in the process, I had many lightbulbs trigger. "Oh, that's why it's like that!"
As much as I love Gentoo, I agree with you: the "faster" argument is a myth.
I hope you can tell I'm not trying to evangelize. :) You said you weren't going to refute that Gentoo is best for me; well, I'll go the other way and not refute that Gentoo is really bad for nearly everybody!
Anyway, I'll take a stab at why Gentoo is best for me: extreme customization. See, there's another way I'm not like most people; others start out with extreme customization and ricing, and they back off of it over time. I started with little and have only grown my customization over time.
Maybe it's because I'm on the spectrum, but computers are annoying to use for me by default. On Gentoo, however, I can make my setup fit me more than any other distro.
Another thing that might contribute is that I like lean setups. Just checked with `ps --ppid 2 -p 2 --deselect | wc -l`, and subtracting the terminal, shell, ps, and wc, there were only 30 processes. And that includes niceties like redshift and picom.
Because I do heavy fuzzing, that matters to me. Also, it is responsive; slow responses bother me more than they do others.
But to be clear, that doesn't refute your experience that Gentoo isn't faster; it took a lot of work to get Gentoo to this point, and it isn't default.
So I am weird.
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.
1. Best documentation I have ever used.
2. Infinite amount of customization. Your system can be as minimalist or maximalist as you’d like.
3. Portage overlays > AUR any day of the week.
4. Choose your own init system. Want SystemD? Fine. Want OpenRC? Go right ahead!
5. It’s hard to understate the power of a good community with well-described values. I feel safe and at home with Gentoo because I know that it will always value the #1 thing I care about on Linux: freedom. Gentoo is like a choose your own adventure. Want to run SystemD + Gnome + PulseAudio + binary packages? You can do that. Want to run OpenRC + Hyprland + Pipewire + NetworkManager instead of netifrc? Go for it!
Gentoo isn’t about compiling everything, it’s about choosing everything. Today’s announcement (although irrelevant to me) gives users more choices.
But this sounds good to make it more optional to compile every time.
Gentoo was the first distro that I grokked. The way they walked you through the build system (honestly can't remember if it was official docs, community forum or what) was just the right balance of teetering on the edge of everything crashing and burning, and learning the deep secrets of how an OS actually works that it kept me intrigued for years. I ran it all through college but then got jobs at non-nix (un-nix?) c…
Not sure how long this has been true for, but the Gentoo Wiki (which includes the Gentoo Handbook[0]) is an absolute goldmine of information, and is probably what you were looking at if I had to guess.
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Only on HN could any state that Gentoo was ever in be reflected upon as "just worked like a breeze" unironically and I mean that in a fond, loving way.
I know it's off topic, but I find it interesting how this sentence was so hard for me to understand. I struggled for many seconds but couldn't go beyond "was ever" because it felt like there was some mistake, like a word was missing here or there. In the first pass, my mind decided that "state" was a verb, and, therefore, there should be a subject appearing before it. But I only found "any", instead of "anybody" or "…
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When every ounce of power mattered, fine-tuning your OS made sense. Nowadays most people are swimming in CPU cores and gigabytes of ram and terabytes of solid-state memory, so fine-tuning is a waste of time (unless you play bleeding-edge games). But it wasn't always such.
> so fine-tuning is a waste of time (unless you play bleeding-edge games). Unless you run javascript 'applications'. Games are already optimized.
Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this one. At least, it doesn't line up with my experience. In my experience, games are optimized _just enough_ for a decent playing experience (and not always then). Games devs, as a whole, are the worst offenders of expecting their users to just throw more money (hardware) at the software to achieve usable/enjoyable experiences. There are, of course, exceptions. But, for every Carmack, there's 10s of thousands of developers scrambling to make their deadline, doing just enough to ship.
Most distros are still not providing x86-64-v3/4 level builds yet, so gentoo is still relevant :P
I finally realized all the tweaking and optimization and bleeding-edge software wasn't worth it once I discovered my Slackware boxes ran as fast as the Gentoo ones. Maybe there's a few very specific applications out there that benefit from all the tweaking and custom compiles; perhaps a render farm or crypto miner? But my games got the same FPS on either distro.