221–230 of 285 posts
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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.
Same but with macOS. The only cool thing about it is that it’s declarative: nix-darwin everything and a fully working and customized machine is up in 10 minutes with one command
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 wonder what makes me different such that Gentoo is the best for me. Ok, I'll bite: why is Gentoo best for you? (I'm not going to try to refute any of your statements should you reply, I promise. I'm genuinely curious.) I'll offer my own experience why Gentoo is not for me: I don't run my own server, and at work I use servers in the cloud (Ubuntu based, I guess? Or AWS-flavored). No compiling any kernels or whatno…
It has zero opinions about how my system should be configured or what options the installed software should have. It lets me build precisely what I want to build without any hassle or compromise.
> I mostly followed the recipes like almost everybody else
The thing I really like about gentoo is I have a virtual/akira package. It brings up any system precisely the way I want it. If I have a new system I can just install that virtual from my overlay repo and be in business within a few minutes.
I wrote this virtual 10 years ago. It still works perfectly. Ironically, I guess I could say, I choose gentoo because I want to spend _less_ time managing my system, and it enables that in a way that no other distribution has for me ever.
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…
> Debian, the so-called "universal operating system" just dropped 32-bit x86 support. This is imprecise at best. There was a meeting where the release team concluded that most likely, there will be no _installer_ and _kernel_ support for 32-bit x86 at some unspecified point in the future. (At the current point in time, both are still delivered and fully supported.) In particular, you can still run multi-arch 32-bit/6…
Which might mean people who want to run old proprietary 32-bit games/software are going to be annoyed, but that's not necessarily the distro/OS's problem; it could be argued that the user should install a 32-bit translation/emulation layer to run that stuff, ala DOSBox.
Upstream binary packages are just another extension of that freedom. You already had binary versions available of a few major projects (or could roll your own build server), but making more of them easily available allows a lot more people to reap those benefits without having to worry about the huge time sink of building every little thing. If you need more flexibility (patches, use flags, ...) for a given package, that's still available and easy to maintain. This is a huge win.
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…
Is this referring only to ports (Portage) or does this mean enjoy compiling kernel and userland.
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> Debian, the so-called "universal operating system" just dropped 32-bit x86 support. This is imprecise at best. There was a meeting where the release team concluded that most likely, there will be no _installer_ and _kernel_ support for 32-bit x86 at some unspecified point in the future. (At the current point in time, both are still delivered and fully supported.) In particular, you can still run multi-arch 32-bit/6…
Does Intel or anyone still sell 32-bit x86 chips for non-embedded use? A quick Google was inconclusive, although it seems that while Intel sells low-power x86 chips under the "Pentium Silver" brand, they all seem to be 64-bit now. So eventually more and more old x86 boxes will be decommissioned, and 32-bit x86 will be dead as a desktop platform, no? Which might mean people who want to run old proprietary 32-bit games…
It's not really clear how long the Linux kernel itself will continue supporting such CPUs. The architecture certainly isn't something anyone really cares about (e.g. Meltdown wasn't patched for several months after it went public and 64-bit x86 got fixed).
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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 dunno, there's a fair amount to be said for having an up-to-date kernel, systemd, and Docker. :)
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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.
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…
> Debian, the so-called "universal operating system" just dropped 32-bit x86 support. This is imprecise at best. There was a meeting where the release team concluded that most likely, there will be no _installer_ and _kernel_ support for 32-bit x86 at some unspecified point in the future. (At the current point in time, both are still delivered and fully supported.) In particular, you can still run multi-arch 32-bit/6…