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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#171

Post by massysett »

oblio wrote: post #47
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again. A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need. On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.

The thing is, that was 20 years ago. I basically did the same thing, at almost the same time, as you. But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast. Gentoo itself is considered generally stable and a pretty solid distribution, or it used to be. I wonder if these days the flexibility and the engineering behind Gentoo might be worth taki…

“But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast.”

I’m not so sure. A lot of the power comes from multiple cores. Years ago I had one core, now I have eight. A lot of the compiles don’t use all the cores.

Software has also gotten bigger. rustc is huge, for example. It didn’t even exist when I used Gentoo years ago.

These days I’m on the Mac and I just switched to Homebrew after using Macports for years. It was for one of the same reasons I stopped using Gentoo: compiling takes too long. Whenever I upgraded Mac OS versions, Macports required me to recompile everything. This was no problem at all for, say, tree. But something was pulling in gcc (emacs needed it for some reason??) and this took ages to compile.

At least Macports worked though. When I used Gentoo, it took so long to compile things that I would leave it overnight, and of course often in the morning I would see that the compilation stopped halfway through because something was broken. Hopefully that’s improved. Or of course maybe the binary packages will help with this.

But if I wanted a build-your-own, rolling-release binary system, I don’t see why I wouldn’t just use Arch.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#172

Post by phamilton »

gtirloni wrote: post #170
connorgutman wrote: post #166

Disclaimer: I am a die-hard Gentoo fan. The appeal of Gentoo is not compiling everything from source, it's having the freedom to install anything you want on nearly any hardware all with stellar documentation and minimal roadblocks. Want to run Enlightenment with OpenRC and NetworkManager on a laptop from 2008? Install Gentoo! Want ZFS as root on a smart refrigerator? Install Gentoo! Want a vanilla Gnome + SystemD in…

I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.

It never recovered from the loss of gentoo-wiki

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#173

Post by BrandoElFollito »

gtirloni wrote: post #170
connorgutman wrote: post #166

Disclaimer: I am a die-hard Gentoo fan. The appeal of Gentoo is not compiling everything from source, it's having the freedom to install anything you want on nearly any hardware all with stellar documentation and minimal roadblocks. Want to run Enlightenment with OpenRC and NetworkManager on a laptop from 2008? Install Gentoo! Want ZFS as root on a smart refrigerator? Install Gentoo! Want a vanilla Gnome + SystemD in…

I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.

I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works.

I then moved to debian/ubuntu and recently switched my main server to Arch. And you are right - I got back this feeling of having all my 10 fingers in the system and living on the bleeding edge.

Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically nothing more so it should have been Debian(a fire-and-forget OS)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#174

Post by BeetleB »

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.

20+ years for me:

https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#175

Post by iamthepieman »

Zambyte wrote: post #135
iamthepieman wrote: post #91

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…

> honestly can't remember if it was official docs, community forum or what 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. [0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:Main_Page

yes that was it. It really is an example of fantastic documentation. I had tried to run a linux distro that I had bought when I was 16 or 17 (in a box from a store!) but failed to see the appeal. The throw you right in the deep end with plenty of support (good documentation in this case) is still how I learn best and I attribute my experience with Gentoo for helping me find the hacker mindset. Anything is possible if you're willing to dig deep enough.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#176

Post by blibble »

intsunny wrote: post #48

I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.

nothing compared to msmpeng.exe, which spins several cores constantly 24/7

(microsoft's anti-virus)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#177

Post by bayesianbot »

So apparently it would be possible to use mostly binary installations but compile some libraries, interpreters and cpu hogging apps with -march=native - and that wouldn't cause any problems with ABI or anything?

Would it be hard to set up a build server on another machine? What if that other machine was running Arch or some other system?

I remember when running Gentoo ~20 years ago, it was quite often that package compilation failed and I had to go fix some package settings or something, don't even remember well except how disappointing it was seeing a failed compilation again after waiting a long time - is this still common occurrence?

edit: at least the build server doesn't look too bad and the running other arch could be solved with a WM / container.. Feeling really like wanting to give it a try, still remember the good times I had with Gentoo way back (even with the compilation problems)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#179

Post by moepstar »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #173
gtirloni wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the Gentoo userbase has been stolen in part by Arch these days.

I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works. I then moved to debian/ubuntu and recently switched my main server to Arch. And you are right - I got back this feeling of having all my 10 fingers in the system and living on the bleeding edge. Now: this was probably not the brightest choice, as this server rund my docker containers and basically…

> I used to use Gentoo 20+ years ago; installing it was eye-opening. It helped me enormously to understand how Linux works.

Same!

Starting with a Stage 1 install was what got me (with some guidance of a friend and the perfect Gentoo Wiki) into Linux circa 2004 (IIRC).

Now, some 20 years later, i much prefer to have not to deal with something as... dare i say.. fragile... anymore.

Yes, much of the breakage i dealt with was probably self-inflicted but always a good learning experience - but most of the time not at the most convenient time :(

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#180

Post by costco »

toyg wrote: post #22
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.

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.

Made an ancient computer with very limited CPU usable for my siblings with Gentoo. The secret is to do USE="-* minimal" and enable things that are required from there. Compiling a custom kernel was actually necessary because it had a really old NVIDIA card that was no longer supported and I had to patch something to do with MTTR. Installed XFCE 4 and it idled with 70 MB of RAM used. Could play Youtube videos without the whole thing freezing whereas Debian could not. Gentoo is great.
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