I've been getting frustrated with the compile-time options of some packages in my current distro (OpenSuse Tumbleweed) and would like to give something source-based a try. I've previously used Slackware and FreeBSD and liked them quite a bit but had too many issues with them day-to-day.
What does LULZ like about Gentoo and why should I install it on my laptop? Any issues or caveats I should be aware of before going in?
Personally it's just comfy. Once you're used to the choices and control you have it's hard to go back. plus you learn a lot about how linux and some software work. Use a distro-release binary kernel. I have a minimal custom kernel which everything worked really well, but zoom wouldn't. Use stable branch and only use testing for specific packages. It's too hard to go back from testing to stable once you do a system wide unstable branch. firefox, rust, thunderbird and libreoffice I use binaries. most of them are already lto'd already. If you can stomach the compiles, its probably one of the most stable and flexible distros. 10/10 recommend.
>Use a distro-release binary kernel.
building your own isn't hard, especially if the whole reason he's interested in Gentoo is not liking what options binary distros choose to build with. (See also: Firefox, as opposed to firefox-bin)
I fully endorse stealing the config file from the distro kernel and then just taking some unneeded junk out in make menuconfig every time you upgrade the kernel, though.
>building your own isn't hard, especially if the whole reason he's interested in Gentoo is not liking what options binary distros choose to build with. (See also: Firefox, as opposed to firefox-bin)
Nah. Fk it. I mean it may be fine one time experience, but I've been building my own kernels for 15 years (not like there was any choice until recently) and this year I gave -bin kernel a try and holy cow.. this saves so much fucking time during upgrades. No way I'm going back
>this saves so much fucking time during upgrades
yeah but how often are those. if you're being an updooter something's gone wrong
>yeah but how often are those.
Once a week for me. I've only updated kernel between major versions, but -bin does saves me some time on this one too, since I don't have to check new options, manually build kernel and rebuild video module afterwards.
Most of the people just want to run 1 update command and forget about it. I was a fan of minimal kernel w/o any modules for a long time, but right now I can't find any downsides of using -bin kernel.
Kernel: arch/x86/boot/bzImage is ready (#8)
real 2m51.298s
user 42m59.019s
sys 4m29.628s
what kind of shitbox are you running lol
regarding LTO can someone spoonfeed me howto enable it system wide?
>regarding LTO can someone spoonfeed me howto enable it system wide?
CFLAGS="-flto"
>what kind of shitbox are you running lol
It's not about a shitbox, it's about my time
What's the point of configuring (checking all the new options), building, rebuilding modules when all of this shit can be skipped with -bin?
Haven't used gentoo-kernel tho, because I'm an old fart that has been using gentoo-sources since forever.
>what is make olddefconfig
>what is make olddefconfig
And building bunch of modules for some network cards that I won't ever use? That kills the whole point of custom kernel.
Dude, ffs. I love -bin kernel. You may too someday. Just accept it and stop with your superiority complex.
What are you talking about?
You configure kernel once for your machine. When you get new version you just copy .config and run make olddefconfig. There is no need to configure kernel manually every time you update.
>building your own isn't hard
The hard part is booting it. There's the EFI-stub option or messing with GRUB shenanigans.
Then there's shit like full system encryption where you have to craft an initramfs but idk how hard that is.
dunno, never have used EFI boot. Still on old-style BIOS booting, GRUB works like it always has, no shenanigans.
Give me 1 reason why I should do any of those things (custom kernel, custom Firefox etc)
what's up with all the gentoo shit being shilled? did your favorite incel youtuber post about it?
holy shit go back to arch instead of shitting on the image of one of the few distros people still respect
you can't be this new...
nevermind figured it out, just had to enable the lto-overlay
just install installkernel-systemd-boot and make install is all you need to do.
>just install installkernel-systemd-boot and make install is all you need to do.
Oh no, new stuff to learn.
I just copied the image to /efi/linux.efi and made boot entry for it.
Sorry but systemd is actually good compared to the literal who alternatives.
And what was so wrong with the old sysV? All those minimalist/traditionalist types should've stick with it instead of reinventing the wheel. Or taking sysV and slapping extra stuff on top of it (openRC).
sysv-style init is neither minimalist nor traditional.
The slightest bloat I can find are the runlevels. And how is jurassic not traditional enough for you?
>And what was so wrong with the old sysV?
For its time? Nothing. Systemd solves a more modern problem, that of resilience, failure handling, and orchestration.
Do you need to make sure your database server starts before eight instances of your application server which should be monitored for responsiveness and restarted if they die? No? Then you probably don't care too much about systemd.
Systemd moving into the desktop space is mostly a factor of typical linux thinking - applying good server practice to desktops even though it's complete overkill, or "bloat". Terry Davis had it correct.
kubuntu is the way to go.
>ubuntu
>KDE plasma
homosexual detected
Obsessed
if gentoo is so good, why isn't there a genthree
There's funtoo
>I've been getting frustrated with the compile-time options of some packages in my current distro
Could just build the said programs yourself instead of going full Gentoo. What programs are we talking about here?
Gentoo was always a fantastic experience for me. Distro of choice for my teenage years and early twenties. Broke less often than Debian and friends, that's for sure. I even ran Gentoo prefix on my Macs instead of Homebrew or Macports.
If you want a source-based distro *these days* for first-class support fucking with compile-time options as you mention, NixOS. I cannot shill it enough. Gentoo has been made obsolete in my opinion. You can mess with recipes endlessly, test them out in a controlled environment that doesn't touch the rest of your system, come out on the other side with exactly what you need and reproduce it whenever. Everything you don't need to tweak just gets pulled from a binary cache.
>First class support for fucking with compile-time options
Can it non-systemd?
Can it musl libc?
Can it clang or are you forced to use gcc?
Can it do system-wide LTO?
NTA but musl is a massive meme. I don't know why anyone would even attempt to daily drive a musl system.
deprecated by GNU Guix, but yeah functional package management in general is the future
Gentoo is about choice. You can't even not use systemd on nix
Cant say to much yet since i installed it for the first time in a VM a few hours ago but i can already tell you that having this much control over package compilation is something i will miss in other distros. Compile times were decent enough using half of a Ryzen 5 3600.
It is actually good.
A friend memed me into installing it, but it is actually a really well made distro.
Not a single person posting in this thread runs Gentoo on bare metal as their daily driver
I am. Thinkpad x270, gentoo is the only OS on it.
u wot anon?
Unironically it's really stable, as a nice knock on effect of the source based nature, if there's a busted package it usually manifests by failing to compile. It also resolves dependency issues other distros get, long as you include -ND in your emerges you'll get all dependent packages updated too. And most of all, like the other anons said, it gives you total control. Sure, you can build a custom kernel on any serious distro, but nothing compares to the control & utility of USE flags. This last one's not really a Gentoo perk per-se, but the Gentoo wiki also has some of the best documentation out there.
fellow AMD Gentoo chad
>6gb in use on GENTOO while using i3
>64GB of ram
HOW and WHY?
I actually use my desktop for everything I do?
So do I but I'm at 4 or so gbs on gnome. I'm not shitting on you just asking what you're doing to consume that much.
NTA but RAM isn't a consumable. If you have 64GiB in your system then there's basically zero reason to close a well-behaved program that's idling. Leave it minimised or on another workspace and you can instantly switch back to it another time without waiting for it to start up.
RAM usage is not a sensible metric to try and minimise as a user, only as a programmer.
I'm fully aware of that and that's not the point of my question.
I'm on gnome at 2.5gb with Firefox, steam, discord, KeePass and freetube open.
I like window managers because they're pretty practical once you get used to them, not necessarily because they use less ram. I have 16gbs anyway.
idk what to tell you anon
my ram usage is what it is
electron apps suck
we live in a browser-based hell:
>firefox
>thunderbird
>steam
>slack
>discord
>while using i3
I'm sorry but all those autistic "window managers" aren't THAT mindblowing regarding memory usage.
>launch a GTK or Qt program
>GTK/Qt libraries get loaded anyway
There goes the RAM savings from your non-GTK/Qt WM.
>want to adjust volume
>volume mixer gets loaded anyway
And from not having a volume applet. And so on.
Bitch
Use kuroba to send this pic so I don't have to transfer it to pc, and it ends up sideways.
FUCK phoneposting
I've been using gentoo for 10 years on a game laptop. There wasn't a single problem required reinstalling the system or chrooting it even though my flags were quite messed up, but there are still a lot of things I don't like in gentoo:
- world updates can be painful. I don't remember when an update went smoothly. It can be a dependency conflict or a stupid build error
- old package versions are removed too fast. If an update breaks something there is nowhere to rollback. Thank god there is package.mask
- portage is too slow and nobody is willing to fix that
Use gentoo for one year. Then you are allowed to use whatever you want to get your work done. Nothing else matters.
> FreeBSD
Real men use OpenBSD.
>on my laptop
if youre using a 10 year old shitpad then avoid. i run gentoo on my x230 only because i can distcc with my 12 core ryzen desktop, otherwise it would take days to recompile things like firefox
otherwise its fine, once i set it up i havent had to do any maintenance, pretty comfy. this is my first distro i switched from windows straight to gentoo and it plays all my games
>picks gentoo linux
>uses systemd
>USES THE DEFAULT FUCKING KERNEL
....
Meme. Avoid Gentoo at all costs, it is overcomplicated, overengineered and - may Allah forgive me for uttering this word - bloated for no practical benefit. You're better off sticking to a simple binary-based distribution and only compile software locally when there is a concrete reason for doing so.
The 5 people who still use Gentoo and keep shilling it suffer from Stockholm syndrome.
gentoo is cute.
bear computer
share rilakkuma ascii pls
https://pastebin com/sFHuyvjr
it's supposed to look like pic related but still werks
wicked thanks!
Trans people love it
It's a fun tinker/meme OS, but definitely not worth using on your desktop computer
can someone redpill me on package masks. i dont get it. half of what i want to install needs to be unmasked/maked nagger shit.
just go back to arch bro
A mask is just a way to prevent portage installing a package without your express consent. There's a few types, you can have a license mask, so you can't install nonfree programs on accident (@FREE), there's a stable/testing mask (the ~ flag means the package is in testing for that arch), you can also manually mask a package/repo and only selectively unmask certain packages/repos (e.g. mask all of wayland), and finally, Gentoo maintainers can mask packages for a couple reasons. Usually they do it for serious vulns (like the one that happened in dev-lang/rust a while back), or broken/deprecated/about to be removed packages, they include a message with a reason, but it only prints the reason for programs you actually have installed. You're probably running into the testing mask, which can be pretty annoying when you want to install a program & dependencies only in the testing branch. You can run 'sudo emerge --autounmask-write=y {your package}' (DON'T include the dependencies in the command)
and then 'sudo dispatch-conf' to confirm the unmask. You could also just switch fully to the testing branch, I've had no problems doing that, aside from the absurd amount of updates you get. Seriously, it rivals Arch in terms of weekly updates on ~amd64. I will give a warning, just because I've had no problems on ~ doesn't mean there are no problems, your mileage may vary.
>on accident
Absolutely Fastest os in terms of optimization
it's pretty nice tbh, especially if you have new hardware without proper support yet, or if you want to play around with libraries/optimization for high performance compute types of things
it has been stable enough for me to use as a workstation os on my desktop, but idk if I'd put it on a laptop personally.
documentation is pretty good overall, just read it and you should be good
if you can set up distcc it would probably be helpful for compiling on a laptop
>if you have new hardware without proper support yet,
...compile a newer kernel. Gentoo doesn't make fabricating the kernel essentially easier as you still need to browse thru billions and billions of configuration settings.