Earlier quoted context omitted.
[dead]
And that's fine! No one cares! Keep using it!
[dead]
Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
191–200 of 204 posts
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#192Earlier 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…
Download image from https://www.calculate-linux.org/ - put it on USB flashdrive. And it's literally yes, yes, next, next - the defaults are pretty good. 1) Calculate Linux is 100% Gentoo with more profiles (e.g. server, desktop-kde, desktop-gnome ...etc) and after switching from vanilla Gentoo to Calculate - I didn't need to tweak any use flags of any packages. Profiles are so good that everything works nicely togeth…
> Calculate Linux is 100% Gentoo with more profiles (e.g. server, desktop-kde, desktop-gnome ...etc) and after switching from vanilla Gentoo to Calculate - I didn't need to tweak any use flags of any packages.
If that's your thing, sure. I find even Gentoo too automated for my preferences. I'm using the most basic from the available profiles and tweak everything manually in package.use. I stopped using openrc and switched to just sysvinit/inittab.
But then, if you want binary packages and such, why use Gentoo or a fork?
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.
As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing for the overall Linux community. They give back far more than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and open source version. For example: - Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA (i.e. Active Directory for Linux) - Red Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello - Ansible ... Ansible. - Red Hat Open…
Okd was a mess when i tried to use it years ago. The documentation was just a 1:1 copy-paste of openshift docs despite significant differences in installation. It really wanted you to use OLM but the upstream operators like maestra (the istio based upstream of redhat service mesh) were often very out of date in the catalog to the point of being incompatible with the current version of okd. I raised the issue on GitHub and a redhat employee replied that they were not happy with the situation at the time but to keep asking to show there was interest. I switched to talos instead for a more vanilla k8s where i could actually get a service mesh installed.
Not really comparable to the experiences i have running keycloak where the upstream documentation is complete or freeipa where it’s identical to idm and you can just use the redhat docs. Those are both excellent pieces of software we are lucky to have.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#194Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardw…
Gentoo is LFS but with the interdependence between packages mapped out for you (all hail the USE flags!) Or, alternatively, Arch with even more customization knobs to twiddle.
I have had Gentoo in at least one nearby system (physical and/or VM) since about 15 years ago. It's always a blast interacting with it.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
While I was always a sourced-base/personalized distribution personality type, this is also a big part of why I moved to Gentoo in early 2004 (for amd64, not Risc-V / other embedded per your example). While Pentium-IV's very deep pipelines and compiler flag sensitivities (and the name itself for the fastest Penguin) drove the for-speed perception of the compile-just-for-my-system style, it really plays well to all cus…
That is a fantastic historical parallel. The early amd64 days were arguably Gentoo's killer app moment. While the binary distributions were wrestling with the logistical nightmare of splitting repositories and figuring out the /lib64 vs /lib standard, Gentoo users just changed their CHOST, bootstrapped and were running 64-bit native. You nailed the psychology of it, too. The speed marketing was always a bit of a red…
True words.
I'd say "the fastest" is a side effect of "allowing one to tune their systems to their utmost liking." -march=native, throw away unused bits and pieces, integrate modules into the kernel, replace bits and pieces with faster -- if more limited -- bits and pieces. And so on.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Not easy to learn is a bit of a red herring imo. Its also a disproportionate amount of stuff to hold in your head once you have learned it for what it is.
An OS is first of all is a set of primitives to accomplish other things. What classic worse-is-better Unix does really well is do just enough to make you able to get on with whatever those things are. Write some C program to gather some simulation data, pipe its output to awk or gnuplot to slice it. Maybe automate some of that workflow with a script or two.
Current tools can do a bit more and can do it nicer or more rigorously sometimes, but you loose the brutal simplicity of a bunch of tools all communicating with the same conventions and interfaces. Instead you get a bunch of big systems all with their own conventions and poor interop. You've got Systemd and the other Redhat-isms with their custom formats and bad CLI interfaces. You've got every programming language with it's own n package managers. A bunch of useful stuff sure, but encased in a bunch of reinvented infrastructure and conventions.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#197Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is a fantastic historical parallel. The early amd64 days were arguably Gentoo's killer app moment. While the binary distributions were wrestling with the logistical nightmare of splitting repositories and figuring out the /lib64 vs /lib standard, Gentoo users just changed their CHOST, bootstrapped and were running 64-bit native. You nailed the psychology of it, too. The speed marketing was always a bit of a red…
> The ability to say "I do not want LDAP support in my mail client" and have the package manager actually respect that is cool. I tried Gentoo around the time that OP started using it, and I also really liked that aspect of it. Most package managers really struggle with this, and when there is configuration, the default is usually "all features enabled". So, when you want to install, say, ffmpeg on Debian, it pulls i…
I also liked the idea when I used Gentoo 15 years ago but you quickly realise it doesn't make much sense.
You are trading off having a system able to handle everything you will throw at it, and having the same binaries as everyone else for, well, basically nothing. You have a supposedly smaller exploitable surface but you have to trust that the Gentoo patches cutting these things out don't introduce new vulnerabilities and don't inadvertently shut off hardening features. You have slightly smaller packages but I'm hard pressed to think of a scenario where it would matter in 2026.
To me, the worst debuggability and the inability to properly communicate with the source project make it a bad idea. I find Arch's pledge to only ship strictly vanilla software much more sensible.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#199Earlier 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…
The value brought by NixOS is on line 6.
--config ${config.sops.secrets."rclone.conf".path} \
Secret management would likely come in NixOS in the future, but in the mean time you can add either use https://github.com/Mic92/sops-nix or https://github.com/ryantm/agenix to make it possible to manage files which have content that should not be public.
Other package managers also provide some abstraction over the packages, and would likely see the same systemd configuration abstracted the same way in post-install scripts. Yet, the encrypted file for `rclone.conf` would come as a static path in `/etc`.
You could resume NixOS as having moved the post-install script logic before the installation, yet this tiny detail gives you additional abilities to mix the post-install scripts and assert consistency ahead of making changes to the system.
Re: Gentoo Linux 2025 Review
#2002025 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?
They only added the binary packages at the end of 2023.