I’ve been a Gentoo user since it first came out. I always liked the idea of buildings my entire system around my actual use case. For example I didn’t own a printer so it made absolutely no sense why I’d ever install CUPS and have that service running. If you install a Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora based distro installing Firefox required CUPS. WTF?!? How does wanting to browse the Internet require printer services installed?
Turns out there is a lot of unnecessary apps installed on your system because all the binary distro aim for maximum support. I am not generic so why install for a generic user?
Who compiles the binary in the configuration I want? What distro extract all the options out and allows me to install X11 apps without CUPS or alsa or dbus or anything else my system doesn’t actually need? The point of Gentoo is to set a single config file to say “whenever you do a ./configure make sure you disable X features, enable Y features, and uses my specific compiler tunings to target a specific use case or build.”
For example I never default building apps with guis. I’d rather be able to SSH in and use everything that way if possible. I then select the very few applications that actually get their GUI interface or configuration tools built. Can’t do that on binary distro.
Nobody obviously. The closest you would get it probably Arch, with a lot of optional dependencies.
And you are not wrong at all, if gentoo works for you. I just wonder if that all that compiletime is ever won back.
Yeah I ran Arch for a little while and it was ok. Felt like it was in-between a binary and a complete source based system but lacked the configurability that makes source base work.
As for getting time back, I setup my system to build stuff at night for upgrades, most apps took a few minutes to build as it’s rare for me to not already have the vast majority of libraries already on my machine. The only things that took a long time was browsers and LibreOffice. Both of which I built when I was sleeping.
Additionally I ran lxc on my system for situations where I had to have something now. Spin up a Debian build and install it. In the background I’d still build a Gentoo clean version and dump the Debian image once it was done.
incredible flexibility in package versions. I can install multiple versions of a package, or install an old version of a package without incompatibility issues
can mix between rolling release (arch-like) and fixed / stable releases (fedora-like) on the individual package level
can very easily create packages not in the repos and treat them as first class
super easy to add and manage patches
global management of compile flags and options
packages in portage are not only programs. You can let portage manage other things, such as users or configurations
support for less common architectures or setups, like using musl, arm, clang, etc.
I’ve been a Gentoo user since it first came out. I always liked the idea of buildings my entire system around my actual use case. For example I didn’t own a printer so it made absolutely no sense why I’d ever install CUPS and have that service running. If you install a Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora based distro installing Firefox required CUPS. WTF?!? How does wanting to browse the Internet require printer services installed?
Turns out there is a lot of unnecessary apps installed on your system because all the binary distro aim for maximum support. I am not generic so why install for a generic user?
Why compile while I can let someone else do it for me? (Just to see it from the other side :))
Who compiles the binary in the configuration I want? What distro extract all the options out and allows me to install X11 apps without CUPS or alsa or dbus or anything else my system doesn’t actually need? The point of Gentoo is to set a single config file to say “whenever you do a
./configuremake sure you disable X features, enable Y features, and uses my specific compiler tunings to target a specific use case or build.”For example I never default building apps with guis. I’d rather be able to SSH in and use everything that way if possible. I then select the very few applications that actually get their GUI interface or configuration tools built. Can’t do that on binary distro.
Nobody obviously. The closest you would get it probably Arch, with a lot of optional dependencies. And you are not wrong at all, if gentoo works for you. I just wonder if that all that compiletime is ever won back.
Yeah I ran Arch for a little while and it was ok. Felt like it was in-between a binary and a complete source based system but lacked the configurability that makes source base work.
As for getting time back, I setup my system to build stuff at night for upgrades, most apps took a few minutes to build as it’s rare for me to not already have the vast majority of libraries already on my machine. The only things that took a long time was browsers and LibreOffice. Both of which I built when I was sleeping.
Additionally I ran lxc on my system for situations where I had to have something now. Spin up a Debian build and install it. In the background I’d still build a Gentoo clean version and dump the Debian image once it was done.
I love gentoo, but for different reasons:
Very true, what OP said barely matters nowadays but the features you listed definitely give Gentoo an edge over most other distros.
Also, we gotta shout out the sheer stability of gentoo and honestly having to compile system packages isnt that bad if you use flatpak.