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Why Gentoo?

blogs.gentoo.org

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Re: Why Gentoo?

#41

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

techcode wrote: post #34
senectus1 wrote: post #14

I have fond memories of spending long nights recompiling with new flags to try and get slightly better FPS in games... this was over 25 years ago so not in the proton heyday we have now. These days I'm a fair bit lazier, throw Fedora on and use it happily. update frequently and it almost never causes me any issues. The Gentoo Forums were a super fun and friendly place back then, I hope they haven't lost that spirit.

Gentoo has pre built binaries for years now - you can be totally lazy about that ... And still benefit from packages/system being smaller/faster because they are not built to cater for all possibilities. And you can still override options (use flags) and compile some things exactly as you want/need them.

It is super nice to be able to mostly use binary packages but build from source anytime you want different options:)

Re: Why Gentoo?

#42

Post by bombcar »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #39
bombcar wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch to using a git backend and portage will fly fast enough. tank ~ # time emerge --sync * Using keys from /usr/share/openpgp-keys/gentoo-release.asc emerge --sync 3.18s user 5.15s system 67% cpu 12.324 total https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Portage_with_Git

Wait, it's that easy? Why isn't that the default?

I have no idea - I randomly stumbled on that when looking for something else and it blew my mind.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#44

Post by senectus1 »

techcode wrote: post #34
senectus1 wrote: post #14

I have fond memories of spending long nights recompiling with new flags to try and get slightly better FPS in games... this was over 25 years ago so not in the proton heyday we have now. These days I'm a fair bit lazier, throw Fedora on and use it happily. update frequently and it almost never causes me any issues. The Gentoo Forums were a super fun and friendly place back then, I hope they haven't lost that spirit.

Gentoo has pre built binaries for years now - you can be totally lazy about that ... And still benefit from packages/system being smaller/faster because they are not built to cater for all possibilities. And you can still override options (use flags) and compile some things exactly as you want/need them.

oh thats nice. maybe if i ever feeling rebuilding i'll look into it again.

but truly, I've been using this install since 33... and am on 44 atm. never have i has such a slick trouble free experience. I've had one nvidia related issue once... I also had to rebuild a mirror once because i wanted to update more than i wanted ZFS, and they were updating the kernel faster than the zfs package was updating. not a big deal. I've moved on happily.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#45

Post by themafia »

hparadiz wrote: post #7

I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

> will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

How are you ever going to get test coverage over the massive number of possible system states and configurations? Are you going to compile every package in portage on every architecture it supports?

Re: Why Gentoo?

#46

Post by hparadiz »

themafia wrote: post #45
hparadiz wrote: post #7

I think it's time to use an LLM to rewrite portage in C. Might be one of my next projects. Should not take long and the result will be easy to deterministically test side by side.

> will be easy to deterministically test side by side. How are you ever going to get test coverage over the massive number of possible system states and configurations? Are you going to compile every package in portage on every architecture it supports?

portage doesn't compile anything. it tells gcc et al to do stuff. the commands it runs are deterministic and the unit tests that portage comes with can easily be used. whether or not some ebuild builds on your machine is kind of between you and gcc and has nothing to do with anything gentoo.

I don't really care about it being a replacement overall. I just want my own emerge command to be faster. I can't believe it's not instant like it should be.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#47

Post by alekq »

As a long-time Gentoo user and supporter, my main issue is the time investment. Not the investment in installing and initial setup, not compilation in the background (binary packages make things much easier today), but staying up-to-date with software upgrades and changes. I did not mind it before the "life happened", but now when it takes even one available night in a month or two, it seems a lot.

Other issue is when you need something promptly, if nothing else to test it out or one-use only and you either have to wait or use something like official binary/flatpak...

Re: Why Gentoo?

#48

Post by DiscourseFan »

I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movie we were trying to watch, which was nearly muted because of the call, was to purchase and install a $20 piece of software. Now, I could go ahead and buy a windows machine which comes preloaded with this feature, but let’s be honest, windows sucks major ass and there is virtually no advantage these days to using it over Linux or a Mac. The software might be a little screwed up but Tim Cook really made some magical consumer grade hardware that outperforms virtually all its possible competitors…still, the audio levels.

I don’t have time to futz around installing Linux distros instead of getting laid like I did as a teenager. I have a job and a girlfriend and more than enough of a social life to keep me busy day to day. But something keeps nipping at my heels, telling me to return to the pen—-the sun is setting on my long sojourn in the warm fields of average life, the long night of idle tinkering approaches once more, that I might sooner forget the morning before it ends.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#49

Post by techcode »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #48

I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movi…

If you're thinking about Linux/Gentoo - but don't want to spend a lot of time for maintaining/updating and most importantly not need time to fix stuff that broke because you didn't update it in months...

I would suggest Calculate Linux.

It's 100% Gentoo, with additional customization (e.g. profiles presetting not just sane defaults, but also things you usually want on desktop [e.g. samba, network printers ...]), there are pre built binaries for all profiles and basically all the software (but you can still override some and get it compiled with or without specific features) ...

And perhaps most importantly - there's extra tooling/automation around the Gentoo/portage updates and such.

With vanilla Gentoo - beyond regular PITA to update packages due to various package/use-flags conflicts (which would make me do it even less often). I was also regularly (every few years) having to reinstall Gentoo because my glibc/bintools/python/etc were so far behind that during system update something would break and fixing it was basically reinstalling Gentoo from stage3 tarball.

It's been ~10 years that I've "switched" to Calculate Linux - and it's "cl-update" was automatically solving even those things that would've left me with world update broken system.

Re: Why Gentoo?

#50

Post by tosti »

bombcar wrote: post #23
Gualdrapo wrote: post #13

Gentoo is customizable. But really customizable. That's my #1 reason for using it.

Gentoo let me install mpg123 on a headless box without bringing in X, which is what pissed me off about RedHat at the time.

I've patched grub, the kernel, linux-util, coreutils and a dozen others. What's the point of having freedom 1 if all you get is binary packages? On other distros, having custom patches is such a chore. With portage all it takes is to have the patch sit in /etc/portage/patches. It doesn't get better than that.
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