Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info

I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.

I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.

  • heartlessevil@lemmy.oneEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    They are referring to the fact that Gentoo compiles everything from source rather than shipping binaries. This creates a lot of duplicated work between every user. But it’s not just for nothing. You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries and they are optimized for your system. It is a trade off.

    • Llewellyn@lemm.ee
      62·
      1 year ago

      You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries

      Do you, though? Do you check e-signatures and do you look at the every row of the code?

      • heartlessevil@lemmy.oneEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        Well, you have the opportunity to. The fact that it is compiled on your system already gives you a lot of discretion. You can at least see what code is going into the compiler locally.

        • Pantherina@feddit.de
          42·
          1 year ago

          This is true. In theory its the best way, but ita crazy to think compiling Firefox can take like multiple hours of full computing power. And I like to update my software a lot.

          Lets do a small comparison:

          Linux power efficiency tier list

          Desktops / WMs

          1. WMs with Wayland?
          2. WMs with X11?
          3. LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, Cinnamon
          4. KDE, Budgie, Mate
          5. GNOME ?

          Packaging

          1. Native
          2. Snap (less runtimes)
          3. Flatpak (shared resources), Containers
          4. Appimage (everything duplicated

          Distro type

          1. Traditional binary native packages, ESR
          2. Traditional binary native packages
          3. A/B root (traditional packaging but with one seperate system as backup)
          4. OSTree (diffs downloaded but whole system built locally)
          5. Own repos for everything, small distro
          6. Compiled from source

          Behavior

          • adblock at DNS level
          • low brightness, light theme on LCD helps
          • energy saving CPU, disabled cores, throttled
          • laptop instead of desktop, no huge 4K screens
          • dont Game lol
          • dont stream stuff lol
          • digital minimalism lol

          So uhm I guess I should switch to Debian 12, update once a week and go out on a hike or something.

    • constantokra@lemmy.one
      31·
      1 year ago

      It’s not duplicated work, because it’s optimized for your system and usage. If it was actually duplicated it wouldn’t be any better than Debian plus waiting 20 minutes every time you use apt.

      • Llewellyn@lemm.ee
        11·
        1 year ago

        Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.

        • Kangie@lemmy.srcfiles.zip
          1·
          1 year ago

          I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.

          These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.

          Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.

          Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.