201–204 of 204 posts
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Try https://www.calculate-linux.org/ - it's 100% Gentoo, with prebuilt binaries ;)
Doesn't Gentoo itself offer binary installation now?
AFAIK Calculate provides more profiles (predefined set of use flags) - instead of just Gnome or KDE/Plasma - it also has Cinnamon, LXQt, MATE and Xfce, as well as one for server(s).
And Calculate also provides binaries for those profiles.
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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 swi…
Then one day at work I wanted to print something and I think I needed to add LDAP and CUPS use flags ... Rebuilding world with those new flags was not finished by the time I was back from lunch break, or maybe it even failed.
Then I discovered Calculate and it's desktop (e.g. KDE) profile turned out to have all those useful use flags already set in it's profiles.
Anyway ...
IMHO main reason to choose/stay with Gentoo/Calculate is flexibility and choice (like not having to use systemd, but also being able to). Habit is a part too - though due to work I've got familiar with CentOS and Ubuntu.
I don't necessarily want binary packages. Sure they are handy/convenient for speed/ease/etc. And even though I can't recall last time I needed to tweak some package/feature use flag (maybe V4L2 virtual camera in OBS?) - I really don't want to give that flexibility up ... As without it - it would be back to manually figuring out compile/run-time dependencies when all you want is just slightly differently configured/built package.
How easy is it to administer gentoo servers? Is it on-par with nix/arch or harder?
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 think that for some years already - Gentoo has been providing binaries for "normal" packages - as long as your config/use-flags match (and if you turned on the option/flag to use binary packages).
And of course places with more than just a few Gentoo boxes were usually already running their own BINHOST setups long time ago.
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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…
What Gentoo really needs is an official immutability mechanism like ostree used by Fedora Silverblue or ZFS/btrfs snapshots of the root/boot volumes. This way the ever-experimental nature of the distro would be compensated by having an easy mechanism to rollback to previous known-good builds.
TL;DR: you can pre-configure and keep updating/building new versions of your own live-boot image of Gentoo/Calculate. Which kind of get's you "previous known-good builds" just the other way around.
Oh and the other thing I also never needed to use is update/rescue of Gentoo/Calculate installation through it's flip-flopping between two root partitions.
Calculate installer by default creates two root partitions, but I've only ever used one. And so far `cl-update` never broke the system - even when I was so far behind that my version of python and glibc got masked (or maybe even removed).
Back on vanilla Gentoo - being that far behind usually meant it was easier to reinstall Gentoo from stage3 :D