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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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141–150 of 204 posts

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#141
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t know they are a positive force? This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat. And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work. And what exactly is incomprehensible? What…

Just a note: Rocky and Alma came out of CentOS

Of course -- but CentOS' upstream was RHEL, no?

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#142

Gentoo has many smart people. Having said that, I can't help but feel that ever since the rise of Arch, Gentoo lost a lot of grounds. This may not be primarily due to Arch, but it kind of felt that way to me. I feel that the Gentoo devs should really look at its main competitors such as Void or Arch, IMO. These seem to be more like a modern Gentoo, even if they are different and have a different focus too.

I have heard rumors that at one point in time gentoo lost its forum - basically a catastrophic strike such as deleting Arch Linux wiki

Not its forum, there was an unofficial wiki that disappeared due to issues with the hoster in 2008. There is an official wiki nowadays.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#143

Reading this while doing emerge @world on my personal workstation, and preparing a fresh annual portage cut for our IT infrastructure (some 600+ VMs, 400+ bare metal servers), running Gentoo.

All the VMs run Gentoo? That's really interesting, what do they do?

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#145
post #9

For me, the most underrated takeaway here is the state of RISC-V support. While other distributions are struggling to bootstrap their package repositories for new ISAs and waiting for build farms to catch up, Gentoo's source based nature makes it architecture agnostic by definition. I applaud the risque team for having achieved parity with amd64 for the @system set. This proves that the meta-distribution model is the…

Embedded usually uses yocto or buildroot or whatever it’s called. Never seen anyone use gentoo.

I can speak for yocto being completely built from source and has a huge variety of BSPs, usually vendor-created.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#146
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-o…

How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix. systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = { serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot"; path = [ pkgs.rclone ]; script = '' rclone \ --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \ --bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \ sync /mnt/photos/originals/ photos: ''; unitConfig = { Re…

Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS.

I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file). But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every package to ever exist in this new language + add a boatloat of extra utilities and infra.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so interested to learn more about this. Do you still run all your emerge commands on the thinkpad? What's the benefit of mounting /etc/portage over nfs? I have this dream of moving all my ubuntu servers to gentoo but I don't have a clear enough picture of how to centralize management of a fleet of gentoo machines

Yes - still use emerge on the Thinkpad like I would on the host, like emerge -avuDN @world and such. This is the wiki article [1] I used to set up most the portage side of things, it covers NFS as well. I use NFS to mount the container's /etc/portage to /mnt/portage and symlink the files to the Thinkpad's /etc/portage so I can cherry pick what I want to keep in sync with the build container. Don't have to mess with r…

Thanks! A lot for me to learn here

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was exactly what I was going to comment on. Why are they not spending more money?? I don't even know what they should spend it on, but like.. it's Gentoo! I would have thought they'd pay the core devs something?

What money? Doesn't sound like they have anything extra?

The $104k balance

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#149
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seconded! I really liked Nix, but found the language and some of the tooling inscrutable. With (non)Guix I got all the Nix goodness, but in a form I understood much better. If Guix wasn't so good I'd be on Gentoo or Arch.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#150
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not a light abstraction? If you're familiar with systemd, you can easily understand what the snippet below is doing even if you know nothing about Nix. systemd.services.rclone-photos-sync = { serviceConfig.Type = "oneshot"; path = [ pkgs.rclone ]; script = '' rclone \ --config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \ --bwlimit 20M --transfers 16 \ sync /mnt/photos/originals/ photos: ''; unitConfig = { Re…

Hah I just wrote something similar today to periodically push backups to another server from my NAS. I agree the systemd interface is rather simple (just translate nix expression to config file). But NixOS is a behemoth; Completely change the way how every package is built, introduce a functional programming language and filesystem standard to somehow merge everything together, and then declare approximately every pa…

I was referring to working with systemd specifically on NixOS. But yes, the Nix ecosystem is not easy to learn, but once it clicks there is no going back.
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