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Gentoo goes Binary

gentoo.org

21–30 of 285 posts

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#21
post #9
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.

You and me both. But, we learned a lot. Nowadays I feel like Linux is my super power, OS, VM, Container, Nix-shell, WSL2. It’s all Linux. And you can drop me on any command line (even a BSD one to some extent) and I will feel at home and can solve problems. I’d like to think that’s where my happy time with Gentoo led to.

And no matter if its true (and it might well be!) the overarching tendency to look for reasons to explain time spent with Gentoo should probably tell us something.

At best, we are at least a bit confused about it all.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#22
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.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#23
post #8
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.

I too used to obsess over customizing my OS. Now I just install Debian, a handful of programs I use daily and that's it. I can recreate my setup on another machine in 20 minutes.

[flagged]

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#24
post #7
post #2

I never settled with Gentoo, but something about it made me interested. Not quite sure what.

4chan meme, or perhaps because it's Linux from scratch for dummies.

I think this is unfair - Arch is also meme'd by linux enthusiasts and 4chan.

Additionally, Gentoo is the largest distro with the source-based package manager USP. I suppose you could take issue with that approach for reasons like the systemd maintainer does where he claims it wastes CPU-cycles and time. Personally I disagree with that assessment since reproducible builds are a vital part of FOSS.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#25
Installing Gentoo was always fun for me, to get it working and the dream of a fully custom optimized machine (I guess Arch offers similar experience, minus the full optimization), but getting everything polished afterwards was always just too much for me and I switched to a packaged distro.

It seems like it would be cool for an SBC, but the compilation (or setting up cross-compilation) was always too much; now maybe it’s feasible again? But I’m too old to have the time to try!

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#27
post #7
post #2

I never settled with Gentoo, but something about it made me interested. Not quite sure what.

4chan meme, or perhaps because it's Linux from scratch for dummies.

I was never a gentoo user (I installed once, like I did for basically any distro back then), but I wouldn't knock the sort of "apparently-unproductive tinkering" that Gentoo epitomizes. Like building the umpteenth blog engine, or yet another Todo manager in $language_du_jour, that's how we learn.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#28
post #5

That's more like a reminder the functionality and binaries were there for the last 20 years...

The amount of packages for amd64 in Gb has doubled from 10Gb to 20Gb since November, so I guess your assertion is false. https://www.akhuettel.de/~huettel/plots/mirrors/binpackages-...

The functionality in portage was there since forever the standard packages (think of it like a standard ubuntu install) were there for forever. They only branched out and offer more binary packages. Which is absolutely great but not a new feature... The headline is still misleading.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too used to obsess over customizing my OS. Now I just install Debian, a handful of programs I use daily and that's it. I can recreate my setup on another machine in 20 minutes.

What handful of programs do you use daily, if you don't mind sharing?

Nothing interesting. I spend like 99% of my computer time in the web browser, ide and terminal.

Chrome, git, ssh, docker, netbeans

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