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Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

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Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#161

Post by TingPing »

IshKebab wrote: post #134
TingPing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s very fair you can say “X works for me” but everyone saying otherwise is in the wrong.

I don't get your point. People regularly complain that Wayland has lots of remaining issues and there are always tedious "you're wrong because it works perfectly for me!" replies, as if the fact that it works perfectly for some people means that it works perfectly for everyone.

My point was the exact same sentiment applies to X. It lacks things Wayland does. So X is only fine for some people.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#163

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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.

Would it not be sufficient to use the official binary packages?

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#164

Post by hacker_homie »

notme43 wrote: post #135
strangedude wrote: post #124

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…

I really have loved the binary packages now I can install gentoo on my laptops.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#165

Post by beeflet »

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.

They contribute a lot to GNOME, libvirt, firewalld and other linux systems that I take advantage of even as a gentoo user.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#166

Post by hobobaggins »

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.

Canonical. at least they used to, although not a fan of the recent (last ten years) Canonical.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#167

Post by hobobaggins »

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

Yep. Gaikai.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#168

Post by paulf38 »

zppln wrote: post #56
gylterud wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Gentoo for ten years (2005–2015), and I was very happy with it! Stable was not the word I would use, in that updating frequently broke and required manual intervention. But it was so flexible! The easily accessible options one has for choosing everything about the system is unparalleled in any system I have tried since. I would still use it if I had more tinkering time. These days I am on NixOS, mostly to have…

I've been on Gentoo for my gaming desktop for like 2-3 years now and I don't think I've ever had an update break anything. I will say though that my valgrind is broken due to march native. :)

If anyone can help adding AVX512 (and other CPU features) support then that would be most welcome. It’s a major task though.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#169

Post by speed_spread »

flipped wrote: post #98
speed_spread wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General administration is similar to Arch or any other regular distro. Package updates necessarily take longer because of recompiling but that's just CPU time. There are precompiled versions of big popular binaries (open office, Firefox, etc) that allow you to save a lot of time if you want. Where you lose time is in trying to optimize your system and packages using the multiple switches that Gentoo provides. If you'…

I don't understand the time sink. Isn't spending time knowing intricate details about your system a good thing? You know better than most if you've gone that deep.

It's good for learning for sure but It's very easy to go too deep and spend time on pointless optimizations and customization instead of doing actual work.

Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review

#170

Post by M95D »

jayofdoom wrote: post #158
M95D wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TLDR: Installation is a pain, initial configuration is a pain and there's always something more to tweak, update is a lesser pain, but still a pain. But it's fun, BDSM-style... Installation is done by booting a liveCD, manually partitioning your storage, unpacking a Gentoo STAGE3 archive, chrooting in it, doing basic configuration such as network, timezone, portage (package manager) base profile and servers, etc., co…

I always tell people this: With Red Hat, Anaconda is the installer. With Ubuntu, ubiquity. etc ... With Gentoo -- YOU are the installer. This means you have to be ready to perform -- more or less manually -- many of the tasks automated in other distributions. I sorta see this as the same as a tutorial level in a video game: you learn how to read and follow the wiki which is essentially the key to success in Gentoo.

No, I don't agree. That would be Slackware. I guess you never used that one before... It doesn't even do dependency management.

Portage/emerge is very much automated and once you set it up it runs updates with just a confirmation, unless you feel the need to tweak something.

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