Live data from Hacker News

Gentoo goes Binary

gentoo.org

71–80 of 285 posts

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#71
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]

Of course you customize your Debian installation over time.

Over time is the key here. A package here, a small config there, and after some time, that installation becomes so unique that it starts reading your mind.

Non-breaking updates is the icing on the cake.

The biggest point is you install Debian once, or when your processor architecture changes.

--Sent from my a 6 year old Debian installation.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#72
post #38
post #6

Gentoo's big attraction for me is Portage. It goes beyond just providing a build environment and dependency management. Ebuilds (Gentoo packages) are supported by great tooling and Eclasses that handle a lot of corner cases in builds. Developing Ebuilds feel like doing a real software project, and is great for anyone who wants to experiment with packages that are not in the official repository. Coincidentally, I just…

For me this is great news for less powerful devices I use that I don't feel like setting up a binrepo for (especially when it involves cross-compilation), but still want to reuse my portage config and custom ebuilds for.

There are definitely going to be interesting use cases like yours. I'm in no way against this development. The more the merrier!

But to be honest, I haven't looked at binrepos so far. Perhaps your reply is a good reason to.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#74

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.

Do you think that many people were even using it and compiling regularly? I left it around 2010 for linux mint. Just last summer I tried it again just out of curiosity, and couldn't even get it installed. They had a broken release and of course there was some hack to re-update everything back to the last stable version, which gave me flashbacks of what Gentoo Life was all about and I stopped then and there.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#75
post #35
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was never a gentoo user (I installed once, like I did for basically any distro back then), but I wouldn't knock the sort of "apparently-unproductive tinkering" that Gentoo epitomizes. Like building the umpteenth blog engine, or yet another Todo manager in $language_du_jour, that's how we learn.

I'm not calling it unproductive, it's useful to learn the OS and how things work. It taught me all I need is debian.

I use gentoo on my desktop and debian on an old refurb thinkpad I got for £100. Both of them are amongst the last of the large independent linux distros and I think both approaches are valid.

Never had a bad experience with Arch but the way they use the AUR as a crutch is a bit off-putting. It's a little bit like a giant gentoo overlay but pushes all the complexity onto the user.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#76
post #65

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?

That's so funny that Java was also the first thing that i had in my mind...also python and "LLM training".

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#77
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.

On my first pc assembled from used parts, I was able to squeeze every bit of compute out of gentoo. Being able to build smaller binaries by excluding dependencies seemed to help a lot. I used it until the first ubuntu was released and it just worked and worked well. The only problem was that it was an ugly brown.

Re: Gentoo goes Binary

#78
Any background on why (now)? The post is a bit sparse.

(I'm also one of those who left Gentoo for Ubuntu, both because compilation made it needlessly slow to wait for a tool I needed, and because emerge was just so slow compared to apt. Ebuilds were awesome at a time when dpkg build tooling seemed to change completely once a year.)

Post reply on HN