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Gentoo goes Binary

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#231

Post by MrDrMcCoy »

pantantrant wrote: post #201
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 can't install Gentoo, specifically, the part where I have to install a BIOS or UEFI grub2 bootloader. No I did not use a musl and / or clang profile. With this being my first impression, unless Gentoo or a downstream fork comes with a installer, I won't consider it. I'm going to install Solus OS / Solus Linux soon, had a good first impression with it's package manager, which claims to be reproducible but not like n…

I have a work laptop that's pretty cursed when it comes to booting anything that isn't Windows or Fedora. I only recently got Arch to boot, and then only by using UKI and skipping the bootloader by directly registering it in UEFI. Maybe Gentoo has instructions for doing the same thing? I think it's actually simpler this way, it's just far less obvious and very new.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#232

Post by darkwater »

zymhan wrote: post #219
TrueDuality wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on customizing the package flags, and features. When using Gentoo in production it became an important part of our security posture to omit the features and integrations with unused software. That being said we've always had a build host dedicated to producing binaries, but the actual support for binaries in Gentoo hasn't been great. Unsigned serving over HTTP or NFS of compiled artifacts is about all you get…

> omit the features and integrations with unused software. That's one of the most compelling cases I've heard for running something like Gentoo in prod. There are so many plugins, connectors, protocols, and often the old neglected ones turn into attack vectors.

> There are so many plugins, connectors, protocols, and often the old neglected ones turn into attack vectors.

Practically speaking this is probably true but theoretically a distribution's job should be to somehow guarantee that a specific package built their way gets the security fixes for the way they built it.

This is anyway tangential to the fact that in security "less is more".

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#233

Post by [deleted] »

galleywest200 wrote: post #164
BSDobelix wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> ChromeOS is built using Portage, Gentoo's package manager, and Gentoo-based chroots. ChromeOS uses the upstart init system. Sounds like they are just using parts of it and not Gentoo itself.

[deleted]

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#234

Post by BillyTheMage »

Zambyte wrote: post #127
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.

I think the biggest case where Gentoo still makes sense is when you have a large fleet of identical machines. In that case, the effort put into tuning your installation will be multiplied across the number of machines it's applied to. For a single machine home install, the biggest value Gentoo has to offer is the learning experience. I ran it for about a year like 4 years ago, and I definitely learned a lot in that t…

I'm a Gentoo daily driver and I'm also looking real hard at Guix. I already live inside of Emacs, having everything in Lisp seems kind of nice.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#235

Post by krylon »

I ran Gentoo on my desktop from about 2005 to 2008. The last year of that period I was without Internet access, and when I tried to update the system after being online again, it broke (not surprising, I heard similar stories from users of other rolling release distros since).

But it just so happens I set up a virtual machine running Gentoo but a few days ago, with no clear idea of why or what for. What a remarkable coincidence.

Gentoo requires the user/admin to put in a lot more work than mainstream distros like Debian, but in return you get such a high degree of control and choice that the system, once it's up and running, feels more like a pet than a piece of software.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#236

Post by connorgutman »

gary_0 wrote: post #223
Sesse__ wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Absolutely not... but hear me out. NetBSD plans on supporting 32-bit x86 until "long after 2038 (http://www.netbsd.org/about/)." Legacy hardware matters for many reasons. Outside of the fact that I still love my Lenovo x60s and use it as a distraction-free writing machine, much of the world still depends upon 32-bit architecture. We can't be replacing computers for all 8 billion people on Earth every 10-20 years. Hell, think about all the government bureaucrats still running MS DOS! :-)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#237

Post by oniony »

voidfunc wrote: post #181
moepstar wrote: post #179

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. 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.

Arch is literally the easiest thing to maintain. I've been running it for over fifteen years, update maybe once a year at most and 99% of the time it's a case of running pacdiff and updating a handful of config files.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#238

Post by starttoaster »

paldepind2 wrote: post #208
saghm wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I wouldn't say systemd is the "one place" where Arch has an opinion. Quite the opposite, Arch is just as opinionated as the average distro. On Void Linux you can choose between musl and glibc, on Arch you're forced to use glibc. On Gentoo you can choose your init system, on Arch you're forced to use systems. On Debian you can have `/bin/sh` be any POSIX shell, on Arch you're forced to have it be Bash. On nixOS you ca…

My experience using Arch has very much been "it's just like all the other distros, except now you have at least 4 package managers to go through if you want to install any particular thing and you will almost certainly need to install utilities that convert packages from other package managers over to PKGBUILD." Other than that, it's felt very similar to just using something like Debian. Which is fine, and Debian is fine, but the praise other people give it as "the modder's distro," or something like it, seems a little over zealous.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#239

Post by connorgutman »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #225
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…

"Personally, I enjoy compiling everything from source and the flexibility that comes with it." Is this referring only to ports (Portage) or does this mean enjoy compiling kernel and userland.

Depends upon the device. I typically opt for compiling the Linux kernel myself but certain devices (like my Lenovo x60s) would absolutely melt if I compiled it from scratch. Thankfully, Gentoo offers gentoo-kernel-bin. Meanwhile my brand new GPD Win 4 Pro has a stupid nvme that requires 6.6.5+ to boot making compiling the only option (until a couple weeks ago at least).

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#240

Post by connorgutman »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #209
connorgutman wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 furth…

> there is a certain philosophy of non-intervention which gives Gentoo a sense of freedom that other distributions lack. While I was untangling update dependencies one day I had it uninstall libc. There was a big warning advising me not to do that, but it was allowed. Everything broke immediately, of course, but I recovered the system and the dependency problem really had been fixed, too! This gave me a permanent pos…

Love this example! In general the way Gentoo handles masked packages also highlights this point. The system will kindly warn you if something is wrong, but it will never stop you from doing what you want. --autounmask also makes it dead simple.
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