I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.
compared to the average power draw of activities like gaming? probably not a significant amount.
Gentoo goes Binary
51–60 of 285 posts
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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 b…
Debian is my set and forget OS as well.
After running my home servers on it, one release wasn't too far behind to run as a desktop, and I've been happy here ever since.
Xfce desktop, move the panel to the bottom, install applications. Use it for the next days/months/years until I decide to look around again.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#53I think NixOS has kind of taken over anything I would use Gentoo for.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#54Interesting that this is still going on.
I haven't done it since Slackware came on floppies and you mostly had to recompile your kernel to get the right drivers in.
Even did a linux from scratch once, later, to see how it goes. Then went along with my business.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#55There was this sweet spot for a while where Gentoo just worked like a breeze, Where there weren't too many and too few useflags and when I would recompile Open Office when my dorm room was too cold in cold winter nights.
Only on HN could any state that Gentoo was ever in be reflected upon as "just worked like a breeze" unironically and I mean that in a fond, loving way.
You could start from a later stage, I think they had a mostly binary stage 3, and emerge was generally solid, albeit slower due to the compilations.
So at least once upon a time (10+ years ago) there was this option of just using it as almost another regular distribution.
Slackware on the other hand... (I say this is in a bad way, and I think it's changed since; for Slackware for anything more complex you had to manage the entire dependency tree yourself, and it was a pain in the neck for anything not part of the not-that-many-regular-packages; nota bene: for the "beaten path" Slackware was more or less just another Linux distro, but the "beaten path" was quite narrow).
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#56[deleted]
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#57Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#58I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.
Probably orders of magnitude less than the amount of wasted energy and greenhouse gases emissions of needlessly compiling the same javascript software over and over again on the billions of devices used to access the web.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#59I remember Gentoo taking more than a full day to compile on my computer back then. It did teach me a lot though, will always have a soft spot for it.
Yeah, A day was pretty normal.
I installed gentoo on a workmachine at a new job, like a dual xeon something with 64gb ram back in a time where 8gb ram on a worstation was plenty. I had a blast. It took "only" like 3 hours to get my usual to go system.
Unfortunately I need haskell on my workstation (xmonad) and ghc can easily take alone like 5-20+ hours compile time on older computers. I compiled ghc a few times on an old t41 - it took more than a day.
Still, gentoo is my first choice. I run it on a few root servers and every workstation.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#60Too little too 15 years too late.
One of the reasons I moved from Gentoo 15+ years ago to FreeBSD was that it was mandatory to compile everything while FreeBSD provided binary packages.
It may be not that important today - but it was a game changer with single CPU core and 1GB RAM.