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Gentoo goes Binary

gentoo.org

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Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#41

Post by mad182 »

zaknenou wrote: post #23
mad182 wrote: 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.

[flagged]

Not sure if you mean that sarcastically, but it's a really boring and stable OS, the setup is just a few clicks and hitting enter a few times. I think I haven't even bothered to change the wallpaper on my newest laptop.

There's nothing really special about Debian as well, it could as well be Ubuntu, Mint or anything else that's plug n play. I'm just used to Debian, and it comes with less junk I don't need installed by default.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#42

Post by bombcar »

iamgopal wrote: 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.

Gentoo’s biggest attraction for me was always the USE flags - being able to turn off the X integration of mpg123 where CentOS demanded an entire X install to get the command line player.

The flags were just icing on that cake.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#43

Post by yung_steezy »

graphe wrote: post #39
yung_steezy wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fun fact is that Gentoo is the most normie distro. ChromeOS is based on Gentoo and all have coreboot. I'm not disparaging it as much as seeing it as a similar learning tool.

This is partially true but I believe that the only component ChromeOS uses from Gentoo is the portage package manager during some of its bootstrapping protocols.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#44

Post by pjmlp »

iamgopal wrote: 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.

The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again.

A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need.

On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#45

Post by bachmeier »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #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…

> minus the full optimization

Back when I used to mess around with this more, I never noticed much speed advantage from compiling my software vs installing binaries. What did help was understanding what was running and cutting out the things I didn't need. I'd be surprised if Gentoo offered any advantages over Arch, Slackware, etc. for that.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#46

Post by squarefoot »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #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 seems like it would be cool for an SBC, but the compilation (or setting up cross-compilation) was always too much;

Back in the day I had a few relatively slow machines and used to compile my kernels using distcc to offload the tasks to them. I never used cross compilation but I see it is supported so it may be a possibility for small SBCs.

https://www.distcc.org/

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#47

Post by oblio »

pjmlp wrote: post #44
iamgopal wrote: 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.

The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again. A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need. On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.

The thing is, that was 20 years ago. I basically did the same thing, at almost the same time, as you.

But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast.

Gentoo itself is considered generally stable and a pretty solid distribution, or it used to be.

I wonder if these days the flexibility and the engineering behind Gentoo might be worth taking another go at it.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#49

Post by oblio »

teekert wrote: post #9
iamgopal wrote: 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.

I agree with you, but we're also lucky (or unlucky?) that the variety of out there's dropped a ton.

If you can, try to get access to OpenVMS or Cisco IOS, it's an entirely different world in terms of user experience.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#50

Post by nottorp »

toyg wrote: post #22
iamgopal wrote: 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.

> so fine-tuning is a waste of time (unless you play bleeding-edge games).

Unless you run javascript 'applications'. Games are already optimized.

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