Gentoo was the first distro that I grokked. The way they walked you through the build system (honestly can't remember if it was official docs, community forum or what) was just the right balance of teetering on the edge of everything crashing and burning, and learning the deep secrets of how an OS actually works that it kept me intrigued for years. I ran it all through college but then got jobs at non-nix (un-nix?) companies and it gradually faded. This seems like a great development but if it had existed when I was exploring Gentoo, I might have taken the easy way and learned much less.
Gentoo goes Binary
91–100 of 285 posts
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For less powerful devices it has always been possible to install Gentoo in a chroot directory on a powerful computer, using a configuration appropriate for the less powerful device, compile and install in the chroot environment any packages, and then just copy all the files from the chroot directory, through Ethernet or using a USB memory, over the root HDD/SSD of the less powerful device. I have used Gentoo in this…
Next you’ll tell me there are optimization settings other than -mtune=native
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#93I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.
Not to mention the wastefulness of general purpose CPUs. Most computer use is in the browser, why don’t we have a Firefox ASIC yet?
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#94I 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 less then they pay out for some TX based miners to shut down when grandma starts freezing.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
What handful of programs do you use daily, if you don't mind sharing?
Nothing interesting. I spend like 99% of my computer time in the web browser, ide and terminal. Chrome, git, ssh, docker, netbeans
Oh wow, I did not expect to see NetBeans here. What do you use it for and why NetBeans?
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#96I shudder to think how many sky high electricity bills and greenhouse gases were released to needlessly compile the same software over and over again.
As far as hobbies go, it's very far from the worst. Some people play games for 12 hours a day on kilowatt gamer PCs, or race their car around a track, or cruise around on a gas guzzling boat, etc.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And no matter if its true (and it might well be!) the overarching tendency to look for reasons to explain time spent with Gentoo should probably tell us something. At best, we are at least a bit confused about it all.
I never used Gentoo, but the time I spend screwing around in Arch was more educational than the video games I would have been playing, anyway.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#98There 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.
I know it's off topic, but I find it interesting how this sentence was so hard for me to understand.
I struggled for many seconds but couldn't go beyond "was ever" because it felt like there was some mistake, like a word was missing here or there.
In the first pass, my mind decided that "state" was a verb, and, therefore, there should be a subject appearing before it. But I only found "any", instead of "anybody" or "anyone". Then there is "was ever in be" which, by itself, is a weird construction. It does makes sense in the sentence, because it is "[the] state that Gentoo was ever in" + "be reflected upon". But since I was (unconsciously) dividing the sentence in smaller parts trying to identify the subject, the predicate, the verb, the object, or whatever would make sense for me, cutting the sentence like that only confused me even more. I kept going back and forth trying to imagine which word was missing, and only after pushing through until the quotation, the whole sentence finally made sense.
Although I can't think of any example right now, I know that it is common to use sentences with structure similar to this one, and I see them almost daily, probably multiple times a day. However, as a non-native speaker, this one was an actual struggle, and I feel so good for having overcome it that I am willing comment on it.
For closure, if I was the one writing this sentence, I would probably use the active voice with an indefinite pronoun, which is also probably what my mind was expecting:
Only on HN would anyone reflect upon any state that Gentoo was ever in as "just worked like a breeze".
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
For less powerful devices it has always been possible to install Gentoo in a chroot directory on a powerful computer, using a configuration appropriate for the less powerful device, compile and install in the chroot environment any packages, and then just copy all the files from the chroot directory, through Ethernet or using a USB memory, over the root HDD/SSD of the less powerful device. I have used Gentoo in this…
Next you’ll tell me there are optimization settings other than -mtune=native
Well, duh. There’s also -funroll-loops.
Re: Gentoo goes Binary
#100I 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 less watts than the full screen videos and rendered play worlds that are drawn behind the main menu on any given AAA console game bought by millions of people.
given the behavior one can only think that software people generally don't care unless it bothers a user metric like 'battery life'.