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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#181

Post by voidfunc »

moepstar wrote: post #179
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

The Gentoo to Arch pipeline is pretty real.

I did Stage 1's as well around the same time but eventually got tired of doing that every so often or fighting Portage and switched to Arch.

Then I got tired of dealing with Arch... and ended up on Fedora.

I always liked Gentoo and Arch, but I don't have the energy to put up maintaining them anymore.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#182

Post by connorgutman »

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.

Definitely a lot of crossover. However, there are several things that make Arch unusable for me. The #1 thing is that Arch only officially supports AMD64. Additionally, while I find Arch’s documentation better than most, it’s hard to understate how amazing the Gentoo wiki is. Lastly, I prefer portage overlays (like Guru) over the AUR. Bigger !== better. Again, the beauty of Linux is choice. Nothing but love for my Arch neighbors!

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#183

Post by Barrin92 »

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…

>while other distributions have been actively removing one's freedom to choose

I think that's a bit unfair. Everyone wants to support everything, but at the end of the day if you want to guarantee security and maintenance and do the job of a distribution you have limited resources on what you can look after. Something always has to give.

On any Linux distribution anyone can install what they want, but what you can genuinely claim to support is always limited by the amount of maintainers you have.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#184

Post by saghm »

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.

The one place Arch still is fairly opinionated compared to Gentoo is being all-in on systemd. That's not to say you _can't_ remove/replace it, and obviously there are Arch-like distros that give other options, but my sense is that GP's comment about Gentoo's draw being completely agnostic to whatever configuration you want makes Arch having even a single strong opinion feel pretty different to users who care about that. I think you're probably right that most people probably don't need that, but then again, even as an Arch user, I think most people probably don't really need the amount of customization that Arch lets you have; I just happen to like it.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#185

Post by aidenn0 »

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 would still be using Gentoo if NixOS hadn't come around. I like Gentoo just fine, but being a sysadmin for NixOS is much easier than being a sysadmin for Gentoo.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#186

Post by mgdlbp »

Zambyte wrote: post #136
luispauloml wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "…

Native English speaker here. The sentence was definitely missing a word. I read it multiple times before I got it too. Your rewrite was easier to understand.

a garden path sentence, but it parses.

[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]

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#187

Post by aidenn0 »

bombcar wrote: post #157
sigzero wrote: post #130

Side topic, when did Gentoo (which is a Penguin) start using a cow for its "mascot"?

IIRC the cow has been there forever (apparently since 2004) - https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Larry_the_cow I always thought it's head kind of looked like the stylized G logo.

I feel old now, since I was using Gentoo before Larry existed, and Larry has existed "forever."

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#188

Post by connorgutman »

Barrin92 wrote: post #183
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…

>while other distributions have been actively removing one's freedom to choose I think that's a bit unfair. Everyone wants to support everything, but at the end of the day if you want to guarantee security and maintenance and do the job of a distribution you have limited resources on what you can look after. Something always has to give. On any Linux distribution anyone can install what they want, but what you can ge…

Perhaps I was being overly harsh. That being said, there is a certain philosophy of non-intervention which gives Gentoo a sense of freedom that other distributions lack. It’s not only about diverse support, it’s about allowing the user to choose upfront. Arch does this as well (mostly). It’s easy to choose your own bootloader, WM/DE, audio server, and etc. I just think that Gentoo takes this philosophy one step further. If you want to install an alternative init system on most distributions you can… but you have to uninstall SystemD and all its weeds first. Gentoo’s solution is simple. Give the user a choice on EVERYTHING upfront.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#189

Post by bee_rider »

BSDobelix wrote: post #156
bee_rider wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it too late? Gentoo has always been a niche within the already niche Linux community, but they seem to keep chugging along happily. Are they having some problems?

~Gentoo is probably the most installed "Desktop"-Linux in the world -> ChromeBooks https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/ChromeOS

I guess what I’m trying to say is, in order to define “too late” we need to define an objective and then figure out if we’ve passed the point where it is possible.

From the outside it looks like the Gentoo community is happy and stable being small. And that’s good.

I’m not sure Google copying some of their software and putting it on Chromebooks is a huge win for the community, although I bet some of the Gentoo devs are proud.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#190

Post by lanstin »

dagw wrote: post #121
toyg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When every ounce of power mattered, fine-tuning your OS made sense I used to believe that and was a huge Gentoo user for years back when it was initially released. Then one day I benchmarked Gentoo and a default RedHat install on every work load I cared about, and everything was within the margin of error.

I like gentoo because I have it set up to compile everything with symbols and the source code in the image, and I can gdb anything I am curious about.
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