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This brings me back to my years of running Gentoo as my daily driver. All fun and games until you update your system over the weekend and spend the rest of the

This brings me back to my years of running Gentoo as my daily driver. All fun and games until you update your system over the weekend and spend the rest of the weekend fixing broken networking. But it is all worth it if your goal is learning the ins and outs of an OS and how it all fits together. It was fun booting to a graphical desktop in a few seconds, opening activity monitor and seeing < 70mb memory used. This was with XFCE around 2010. Now it is 2020 and Task Manager on my daily Windows 10 machine shows 27gb memory used.

aembleton 6y ago
27GB? Or 2.7GB?
- innocenat 6y ago
  Probably not after boot, but during active use.
- gexla 6y ago
  My browser alone can eat up 2.7 GB of RAM.
justaj 6y ago
Every time I read comments about Gentoo it's either about systems unexpectedly getting broken after an update, which supposedly requires considerable amount of effort to fix, or I read about how extremely stable Gentoo systems are and require almost no maintenance. It seems like there's some dissonance here and I'm not sure where this comes from.
- bananaface 6y ago
  I think 90% of the difference is explained by package load. The more moving parts, the less stable the machine. If you run 10 packages from stable repos, Gentoo will be stable. If you run 900 packages from wherever they were available (more realistic IMO) then it's much more likely to break.
- pizza234 6y ago
  > It seems like there's some dissonance here and I'm not sure where this comes from. It's because of ego at play. Users of such operating systems (which are essentially sysadmins), and, more in general, a certain type of tinkerers (for example: experimental/edge technologies), don't see their tools as a mean, but as an end. This is totally fine of course (it's an interest like any other), but it has some perverse side-effects, in particular, there are a couple of phenomenons. 1. "IT TOTALLY WORKS". Making such systems work is complex, so there's often pride in showing off the success (exacerbated by the communities, who laud such accomplishments). It doesn't matter if such success is solid, or it's held on with duct tape (like it often is), because what matters is that it works, or, more specifically, it worked at least once on one system (:rolling_eyes:). Additionally, the moral burden of breakages moves to the user. If something in Ubuntu breaks, it's Canonical's fault. If something in Gentoo break, it's the user's fault. And it's not fun for users to openly admit that they caused a breakage. 2. "IT REQUIRES NO MAINTENANCE!". Routine operations get so embedded in the workflow of such systems, that users forget that they actually do them. Pride also takes part. So... "the system doesn't require ANY maintenance", because update burdens (eg. conflict solving) are, hmmm, "not maintenance", because they're... forgotten (:rolling_eyes: again). I've been in a few such communities, and I left, or, to be more specific, and found long-lasting solution and stuck with them, rather than chasing the latest and greatest for the sake of it. I used to get _really_ annoyed when something that was supposed to "totally work" was either just a bunch of commands run by somebody who clearly didn't know what they were doing, or was hiding other things that correspondingly would not work.
- hiena03 6y ago
  I was a Gentoo user about 5 years ago. With Gentoo you can have both, if you only use stable packages you shouldn't broke your system. But if you are using bleeding edge packages thinks can break.
  - accelbred 6y ago
    Current Gentoo user. I find the opposite. Using unstable, things just work. Sometimes package updates fail to compile but your system is still fine, and the package will get fixed eventually. Never had an update break my system on unstable. Stable often had issues, which I presume is due to devs mostly working on unstable.
bananaface 6y ago
Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. Empty memory is wasted memory, using 70mb of memory in a 32GB machine is an anti-feature. You should be caching. My problem with OSes like Gentoo is they give you the illusion of teaching you how OSes work when you're actually just learning the structure of a decoupled Linux system. RAM caching is basic stuff (and there's basically no reason not to do it), if Gentoo was a good educational pipeline users should not be coming out with gaps in their knowledge like that. IMO OSes like Gentoo mainly teach you how to plug together artificially isolated components (which preclude cross-cutting concerns & optimisations that rely on the structure of large sections of the system being known & predictable) and give you the illusion of understanding, while wasting a huge amount of your time debugging problems that are superficial. It's like installing a bunch of (fragile) pip packages and thinking you've learned Python. I would bank on the average Gentoo user being unable to actually write a significant OS component, and I think that's a much more useful metric than knowing how Linux plugs together.
- innocenat 6y ago
  I don't know how Gentoo display the RAM usage, but I am pretty sure both macOS and Windows does not show the RAM used for file caching as "used".
  - bananaface 6y ago
    Some is hidden, some isn't. Compressed memory swells your system process (on Windows) as far as I understand it.
- leotaku 6y ago
  > Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. I think you might be mistaken. Task Manager seems to generally consider cached memory as available. Most Linux monitoring tools I have used also do this. > Since cached pages can be easily evicted and re-used, some operating systems, notably Windows NT, even report the page cache usage as "available" memory, while the memory is actually allocated to disk pages. This has led to some confusion about the utilization of page cache in Windows.[^1] So both the Linux/Gentoo and Windows systems in question should most likely be caching files. The Windows system might even be caching less aggressively, just because almost all memory is in use by processes. [^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache

aembleton 6y ago

27GB? Or 2.7GB?

innocenat 6y ago
Probably not after boot, but during active use.
gexla 6y ago
My browser alone can eat up 2.7 GB of RAM.

justaj 6y ago

Every time I read comments about Gentoo it's either about systems unexpectedly getting broken after an update, which supposedly requires considerable amount of effort to fix, or I read about how extremely stable Gentoo systems are and require almost no maintenance. It seems like there's some dissonance here and I'm not sure where this comes from.

bananaface 6y ago
I think 90% of the difference is explained by package load. The more moving parts, the less stable the machine. If you run 10 packages from stable repos, Gentoo will be stable. If you run 900 packages from wherever they were available (more realistic IMO) then it's much more likely to break.
pizza234 6y ago
> It seems like there's some dissonance here and I'm not sure where this comes from. It's because of ego at play. Users of such operating systems (which are essentially sysadmins), and, more in general, a certain type of tinkerers (for example: experimental/edge technologies), don't see their tools as a mean, but as an end. This is totally fine of course (it's an interest like any other), but it has some perverse side-effects, in particular, there are a couple of phenomenons. 1. "IT TOTALLY WORKS". Making such systems work is complex, so there's often pride in showing off the success (exacerbated by the communities, who laud such accomplishments). It doesn't matter if such success is solid, or it's held on with duct tape (like it often is), because what matters is that it works, or, more specifically, it worked at least once on one system (:rolling_eyes:). Additionally, the moral burden of breakages moves to the user. If something in Ubuntu breaks, it's Canonical's fault. If something in Gentoo break, it's the user's fault. And it's not fun for users to openly admit that they caused a breakage. 2. "IT REQUIRES NO MAINTENANCE!". Routine operations get so embedded in the workflow of such systems, that users forget that they actually do them. Pride also takes part. So... "the system doesn't require ANY maintenance", because update burdens (eg. conflict solving) are, hmmm, "not maintenance", because they're... forgotten (:rolling_eyes: again). I've been in a few such communities, and I left, or, to be more specific, and found long-lasting solution and stuck with them, rather than chasing the latest and greatest for the sake of it. I used to get _really_ annoyed when something that was supposed to "totally work" was either just a bunch of commands run by somebody who clearly didn't know what they were doing, or was hiding other things that correspondingly would not work.
hiena03 6y ago
I was a Gentoo user about 5 years ago. With Gentoo you can have both, if you only use stable packages you shouldn't broke your system. But if you are using bleeding edge packages thinks can break.
- accelbred 6y ago
  Current Gentoo user. I find the opposite. Using unstable, things just work. Sometimes package updates fail to compile but your system is still fine, and the package will get fixed eventually. Never had an update break my system on unstable. Stable often had issues, which I presume is due to devs mostly working on unstable.

bananaface 6y ago

Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. Empty memory is wasted memory, using 70mb of memory in a 32GB machine is an anti-feature. You should be caching. My problem with OSes like Gentoo is they give you the illusion of teaching you how OSes work when you're actually just learning the structure of a decoupled Linux system. RAM caching is basic stuff (and there's basically no reason not to do it), if Gentoo was a good educational pipeline users should not be coming out with gaps in their knowledge like that. IMO OSes like Gentoo mainly teach you how to plug together artificially isolated components (which preclude cross-cutting concerns & optimisations that rely on the structure of large sections of the system being known & predictable) and give you the illusion of understanding, while wasting a huge amount of your time debugging problems that are superficial. It's like installing a bunch of (fragile) pip packages and thinking you've learned Python. I would bank on the average Gentoo user being unable to actually write a significant OS component, and I think that's a much more useful metric than knowing how Linux plugs together.

innocenat 6y ago
I don't know how Gentoo display the RAM usage, but I am pretty sure both macOS and Windows does not show the RAM used for file caching as "used".
- bananaface 6y ago
  Some is hidden, some isn't. Compressed memory swells your system process (on Windows) as far as I understand it.
leotaku 6y ago
> Memory used on Windows doesn't mean the same as on Gentoo. Most of that is cached files and it will be discarded when a program needs that memory directly. I think you might be mistaken. Task Manager seems to generally consider cached memory as available. Most Linux monitoring tools I have used also do this. > Since cached pages can be easily evicted and re-used, some operating systems, notably Windows NT, even report the page cache usage as "available" memory, while the memory is actually allocated to disk pages. This has led to some confusion about the utilization of page cache in Windows.[^1] So both the Linux/Gentoo and Windows systems in question should most likely be caching files. The Windows system might even be caching less aggressively, just because almost all memory is in use by processes. [^1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_cache