4 ms·

I think 2022 will be the year I finally take a crack at this

by Decabytes 5y ago

adamnemecek 5y ago
It’s kinda pointless.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  "The Hacker who did not look into things". Of course there may exist interpretations that bring your statement to the level of debatable, but if you keep them inexplicit, should the reader divinate?
- belkarx 5y ago
  Depends on what your goal is. If you want a useable OS, it's not worth the time. If you wish to learn about compilation and the "core" of Linux, then go for it
- eternityforest 5y ago
  Still seems slightly more point-ful than the other enthusiast distros
- shmoe 5y ago
  It's a good exercise, you're not doing much with the resulting box though, for sure.
- silisili 5y ago
  Downvoted comment, but agreed. Compiling every package is a pointless exercise. Even benchmarks showed Ubuntu was faster than Gentoo. Package based build your own distros like Arch or Slackware give you most of the same experience in 1/100th the time.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    > Even benchmarks showed Ubuntu was faster than Gentoo. Source/details? I would easily believe that Ubuntu was nearly as fast, or perhaps even exactly as fast, but I can't think of any way for a custom-compiled program to be slower than a distro-provided binary.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      Bad benchmark possibly - Ubuntu presumably has some optimizations enabled by default, and portage could've been set to build with no optimizations (not used gentoo before, so I could be misunderstanding something). Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
        Yeah, you can tell Gentoo to build with -O0 if you want to, so that's quite possible; likewise, you can try to overdo it and create performance regressions (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17158219/in-which-scenario-would-unroll-loops-not-making-result-code-faster https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17158219/in-which-scenar...). Boot time crossed my mind, too, but Gentoo is happy to run with systemd so that's not really "Gentoo vs Ubuntu" so much as "this exact variant of Gentoo vs default Ubuntu" which is kind of fair. (Assuming, of course, that OpenRC is slower to boot than systemd, which would also be an interesting benchmark)
        Shared404 5y ago
        Overdoing it does seem quite likely - if I didn't know and was trying to do a test I could easily see myself just enabling all the optimizations and moving on. I would as well. My understanding is that SystemD does more parallelization/magic to decrease boot time, but is a bigger system to try to comprehend and has more surface in general. I believe parallelization is a configurable option on OpenRC though, I'll add that test to the list to try some time.
      - TacticalCoder 5y ago
        > Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time? The first time I switched to systemd, years ago (when Debian moved to systemd), I noticed the boot becoming much faster. So, yup, it was a thing. But now, years later, I got rid of systemd and honestly I don't see my system booting much slower. I mean: if Debian takes, say, 0.3s to show me the login prompt while Devuan (the Debian fork with all the systemd stuff stripped away) takes 0.4s, who cares... (fwiw I always boot into text console, log in there, then manually launch the graphical display) I don't think that the "faster boot time" is an argument in favor of systemd anymore, at least not on a modern system. And in case you need to spin a container in a heartbeat, you may be using some ultra minimal Linux distro like Alpine anyway.
- five82 5y ago
  The outdated process is pointless. There are way too many rinse and repeat compilation steps. Focus the manual effort on the concepts that need to be taught and automate the rest. I feel like they make the default runbook overly tedious to give you a false sense of accomplishment.
- grae_QED 5y ago
  No, it has a point.
dghughes 5y ago
I take a stab at it about every 5 years. Each time getting a bit closer to accomplishing anything. Great for learning about Linux though. The last time I tried LFS seemed abandoned or so out of date nothing worked, links to packages abandoned.
phist_mcgee 5y ago
Which coincidentally will also be the year of linux on the desktop.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Linux runs fine on the desktop. And looks much better than Windows {10,11}. But you are always free to send your data to your favourite OS vendor.

I think 2022 will be the year I finally take a crack at this

adamnemecek 5y ago

It’s kinda pointless.

mdp2021 5y ago
"The Hacker who did not look into things". Of course there may exist interpretations that bring your statement to the level of debatable, but if you keep them inexplicit, should the reader divinate?
belkarx 5y ago
Depends on what your goal is. If you want a useable OS, it's not worth the time. If you wish to learn about compilation and the "core" of Linux, then go for it
eternityforest 5y ago
Still seems slightly more point-ful than the other enthusiast distros
shmoe 5y ago
It's a good exercise, you're not doing much with the resulting box though, for sure.
silisili 5y ago
Downvoted comment, but agreed. Compiling every package is a pointless exercise. Even benchmarks showed Ubuntu was faster than Gentoo. Package based build your own distros like Arch or Slackware give you most of the same experience in 1/100th the time.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  > Even benchmarks showed Ubuntu was faster than Gentoo. Source/details? I would easily believe that Ubuntu was nearly as fast, or perhaps even exactly as fast, but I can't think of any way for a custom-compiled program to be slower than a distro-provided binary.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    Bad benchmark possibly - Ubuntu presumably has some optimizations enabled by default, and portage could've been set to build with no optimizations (not used gentoo before, so I could be misunderstanding something). Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time?
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Yeah, you can tell Gentoo to build with -O0 if you want to, so that's quite possible; likewise, you can try to overdo it and create performance regressions (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17158219/in-which-scenario-would-unroll-loops-not-making-result-code-faster https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17158219/in-which-scenar...). Boot time crossed my mind, too, but Gentoo is happy to run with systemd so that's not really "Gentoo vs Ubuntu" so much as "this exact variant of Gentoo vs default Ubuntu" which is kind of fair. (Assuming, of course, that OpenRC is slower to boot than systemd, which would also be an interesting benchmark)
      - Shared404 5y ago
        Overdoing it does seem quite likely - if I didn't know and was trying to do a test I could easily see myself just enabling all the optimizations and moving on. I would as well. My understanding is that SystemD does more parallelization/magic to decrease boot time, but is a bigger system to try to comprehend and has more surface in general. I believe parallelization is a configurable option on OpenRC though, I'll add that test to the list to try some time.
    - TacticalCoder 5y ago
      > Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time? The first time I switched to systemd, years ago (when Debian moved to systemd), I noticed the boot becoming much faster. So, yup, it was a thing. But now, years later, I got rid of systemd and honestly I don't see my system booting much slower. I mean: if Debian takes, say, 0.3s to show me the login prompt while Devuan (the Debian fork with all the systemd stuff stripped away) takes 0.4s, who cares... (fwiw I always boot into text console, log in there, then manually launch the graphical display) I don't think that the "faster boot time" is an argument in favor of systemd anymore, at least not on a modern system. And in case you need to spin a container in a heartbeat, you may be using some ultra minimal Linux distro like Alpine anyway.
five82 5y ago
The outdated process is pointless. There are way too many rinse and repeat compilation steps. Focus the manual effort on the concepts that need to be taught and automate the rest. I feel like they make the default runbook overly tedious to give you a false sense of accomplishment.
grae_QED 5y ago
No, it has a point.

dghughes 5y ago

I take a stab at it about every 5 years. Each time getting a bit closer to accomplishing anything. Great for learning about Linux though. The last time I tried LFS seemed abandoned or so out of date nothing worked, links to packages abandoned.

phist_mcgee 5y ago

Which coincidentally will also be the year of linux on the desktop.

hulitu 5y ago
Linux runs fine on the desktop. And looks much better than Windows {10,11}. But you are always free to send your data to your favourite OS vendor.