Gentoo goes Binary • Hacker News Board

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#61

Post by pjmlp » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #47

pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 taki…

Even 1-2 hours is too much for me.

I rather use programming languages ecosystems that favour binary libraries for a reason.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#62

Post by 1oooqooq » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #54

Interesting 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.

wow. slackware is around since 93 and loadable modules since 95... i always remembered compiling drivers in to save RAM (i.e. i was more removing drivers than adding). But somewhere around kernel 1.2 we did have to compile driver modules in, indeed.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#63

Post by 1oooqooq » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

chpatrick wrote: post #53

I think NixOS has kind of taken over anything I would use Gentoo for.

you build "impure" (in nixos speak) packages for all your software? if not this is not a close comparisson. gentoo shines when you need system wide control of build flags (for perf or security)

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#64

Post by bombcar » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

hoyd wrote: post #2

I never settled with Gentoo, but something about it made me interested. Not quite sure what.

Gentoo was also one of the first accessible rolling release distros, which has its own advantages (and disadvantages, to be sure).

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#65

Post by phh » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

intsunny wrote: post #48

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.

Wanna talk about JS? Java?

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#66

Post by goalieca » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

intsunny wrote: post #48

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.

What’s your standard build look like at work and how Many times a day does it run? Does it go all the way to deploying a dev cluster??

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#67

Post by tjoff » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 2:02 PM UTC

Narishma wrote: post #58

intsunny wrote: post #48

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.

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.

Not to talk about all the batteries we burn out from it or the billions of devices that is replaced solely because we run so utterly inefficient software.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#68

Post by RuggedPineapple » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #54

Interesting 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.

The Pi (at least 1-4, haven't looked at 5) has an extremely weird set up where the GPU actually boots the system using a binary blob before handing it over to the CPU. When mainstream linux was first beginning to support the Pi this caused a lot of issues. One of which was that GPU acceleration was not available. It was in the Pi foundation's own distro (Raspbian/RaspberryPi OS) but not in others. One of the first to get it working was Gentoo. I really, really wanted to get Open Morrowind working so I tried it for a while.

Then I had to re-emerge a software package to change my timezone and I was just done. Thats way more complicated then it should be or needs to be.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#69

Post by globular-toast » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

intsunny wrote: post #48

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.

I heat my home. The difference between heating via compiling my kernel and heating via whatever heating you use is almost certainly negligible. But I get a custom built system out of it too.

I don't cool my home, though.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#70

Post by skriticos2 » Fri, Dec 29, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

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.

Yea, same here back in the day. Stage 1 installations for Gentoo really made me interact with the kernel and software in a different way. It did not just work, but while solving the issues, I learned a lot on how things worked internally. It's a great thing to get really familiar with the workings under the hood.

But yea, now-a-days I'm on Ubuntu LTS.