12 ms·

Gentoo Linux 2022 Retrospective

146 points by jandeboevrie 4y ago

icare_1er 4y ago
I love Gentoo. Used to be my daily distro up to 5/6 years ago, I moved to Arch out of laziness because it was not manageable to always recompile a lot of packages. I still have the same PC than at that time and from time to time wondering if I should give it a go again.
dewey 4y ago
It's good to see Gentoo going strong. It used to be my main server operating system, I have fond memories of recompiling everything because of some libc updates on my low powered Intel Atom based server.
- danaos 4y ago
  As someone who frequently recompiles ungoogled chrommium on arch, I hate to even imagine the pain of Gentoo.
  - abrouwers 4y ago
    Funny, I'm the opposite - I use gentoo and don't mind, but only use -bin packages for browsers because they take too long :D
  - japanman425 4y ago
    Why do you bother there are binaries or just use a different browser?
snvzz 4y ago
A pretty good year. I particularly enjoy the liveGUI iso and the clang as system compiler.
bitwize 4y ago
I bought a Compaq laptop with an AMD64 processor back in 2006, my first 64-bit machine. I put Gentoo on it to make sure I had 64-bit support for all the apps because the major distros at the time weren't all there yet. Man, that thing chugged to compile everything, but I was there... 64-bit everything!
Szpadel 4y ago
For me biggest killer feature in Gentoo would be decoupling building and installing process. eg. I run emerge on my low power laptop and it contacts my server to build binary packages with exact cflags and use flags requested by client. something jak distcc but on package level.
- Pfiffer 4y ago
  Someone has to have built some kind of automated binhost thing like this _somewhere_. I would love it if you could also do crossdev for Arm with it as well.
- necrotic_comp 4y ago
  This is distcc.
- nix23 4y ago
  That's exactly what i do with FreeBSD and Poudriere. I have a hetzner server that compiles ~all packages (ports) 24x7, optimized and customized for home and the business machines (Laptops, Servers(x64 and arm64), Workstations and jail-templates(x64 and arm64)) for two FreeBSD versions 12.x and 13.x RELEASE. Then on the machines i point the pkg-repo to it (the hetzner-server) and install it as binary pkg's ala ArchLinux.
- chpatrick 4y ago
  Nix can do that too.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  That's precisely what RELM[1] does. [1] https://github.com/Falkorium/relm https://github.com/Falkorium/relm
  - Szpadel 4y ago
    Mind double check url? Getting 404
plq 4y ago
Gentoo rocks. Installing Gentoo is a wonderful learning experience and it's the most flexible distro out there -- especially if you need to run a patched userland. Not mentioned: Gentoo Prefix project is useful for managing a Gentoo installation that is at a path other than /. We use it for building our Linux development environment. See [1] to give it a try. Warning! It will compile almost everything so it's going to take a bit of time! [1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix/Bootstrap#Performing_a_Gentoo_Prefix_bootstrap_using_the_interactive_installer_.28recommended.29 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix/Bootstrap#Perfor...
- Szpadel 4y ago
  I tried to do something similar for building highly optimized and slimmed down (only use flags that are needed) for container images (installing with different root path) but got some library issues in resulting system and gave up. maybe I'll try the same with prefix. I'm curious if compiling everything with exact expected CPU and LTO would result in measurable performance gains.
Cockbrand 4y ago
I really loved Gentoo as my main distro around 2005 or so. It was so nicely customizable and (comparatively) bleeding-edge. But then compiling everything seemed so wasteful in terms of CPU time and power in the end. X.org or GCC updates had to run overnight because the computer was pretty much unusable while that happened. So I eventually switched to boring old Debian, which is so nice and simple. Still, good to see that it's still around, and there's an active community! I might even install it on some box I've got lying around.
- rollcat 4y ago
  > But then compiling everything seemed so wasteful in terms of CPU time and power in the end. Is there a solution to cache the build artefacts and/or share them between a fleet of machines? (inb4 nix)
  - comboy 4y ago
    Yes, distcc. But builds are a pleasure with so many cores nowadays, there's also niceness options so even on the old machines you didn't need to suffer.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - nubinetwork 4y ago
      Distcc moves the compilation somewhere else, ccache stores the compiled outputs, and both can work together. Although I'm not entirely sure how ccache works when all your clients use different CPUs. I only use distcc.
      - sagarm 4y ago
        I've found icecream to be a lot nicer since it handles toolchain distribution and scheduling.
- leipie 4y ago
hanslub42 4y ago
I have been using Gentoo forever (actually since around 2005). It has always worked well for me, documentation is great (though I always take a look at the Arch documentation as well), it is extremely stable (even though I run the "unstable" version (~amd64) Th only thing that sometimes requires a bit of elbow grease is the update process (emerge @world) which can throw up large lists of "blockers", especially when some major component changes (like say the transition from python2 to python3). "eselect news" gives ample warning beforehand. This is the reason I never advise new linux users to use it, but I also don't see myself using any different distribution.
- comboy 4y ago
  I also started about that time and left it about 2 years ago. I've only reinstalled once during that time. But even on stable portage version these blocks are hell. Especially when you don't feel like toying with it for like a year and then it turns out that upgrade process requires packages versions which are not in the portage anymore etc. With all but the most popular hardware you are pretty much on your own. It usually drops down to getting some debian drivers and understanding your system. It's all doable, but it's time consuming. Still I don't think any distribution comes close to being so well organized and nice overall. It seems to take security seriously. It's just too bad that it became so unpopular. It's really hard to use it to a full potential without becoming a contributor nowadays. Which is fine if that's what you want to do but there are times when you want your OS to be your tool not your hobby. With more popularity it could be a very productive tool.
- japanman425 4y ago
  How unstable is ubuntu latest lts compared to this?
  - simoncion 4y ago
    Over the two or four years I used Ubuntu, I burned more time fixing upgrade problems in Ubuntu than (barring the libpng nonsense way back in the day) I've spent fixing Gentoo upgrade problems since ~2004. I really, really, really wanted to be able to recommend Ubuntu, and for a long while it was REALLY good, so I could. But then something happened inside Canonical, (I guess they turned into clowns?) and they started releasing software that would just break _bad_ on upgrade. (In fact, had I not spent so much time developing my sysadmin skills with Gentoo, I would have been unable to recover from the upgrade problems I ran into.)
mrslave 4y ago
Recovering Gentoo user here. I have lost so many hours to the time sink that is incomplete system package updates on Gentoo. Moved to Nix and never looked back. On Nix either the install - and occasional build - succeeds and I enter the new environment, or it fails and I don't. In the worst case scenario where the build succeeds but something is funky I can just roll it back. Now I have all this free time to lose to the time sink that is learning how to package applications in the Nix language.
- simoncion 4y ago
  What do you mean by "incomplete system package updates"? I don't _think_ I've encountered any such thing in the past 10+ years, but my assumption of what you mean might be incorrect. (Other than rebuilding the three(!) copies of Chromium I have installed on my desktop, I don't remember encountering any notable packaging-related time sinks since the days of that nasty libpng upgrade way back when. IIRC, it was some terrible breaking change after an upgrade to 1.2 or 1.4 or some shit.)
  - mid-kid 4y ago
    I recently wrote a quip about this on the gentoo forums: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1161242.html https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1161242.html Basically, portage only ensures package consistency at the start and the end of a portage package transaction (upgrade, install, removal). Anywhere in the middle, if anything fails, or your package upgrades take too damn long and you need to use your system in the meantime, the programs you use can be subtly broken. This is especially painful when upgrading between ecosystems of packages with modules that are version-bound to eachother. Think for example python upgrade, Qt upgrades and KDE upgrades, that will simply not run until the entire stack has finished upgrading. This is a problem that many distributions deal with, but the chances of failure in binary distributions are much smaller, and the time taken between the two states wherein your system is "consistent" is significantly shorter. It'd be nice if portage was able to use a temporary system to build packages in, and only install onto the running system once everything has finished upgrading. Unfortunately, designing machinery for this is complicated, and most veteran gentoo users will suggest you use a chroot or a separate system to build packages for the system you're using.
acomjean 4y ago
The finance section show they do a ton with very little but there maybe trouble ahead. $16,000 in revenue, approx 65,000 in expenses and a balance of 97,000 in the bank.
- goodcanadian 4y ago
  It is not quite so bad as that. They list $11000 in operating expenses and $9500 in depreciation, so more like $20500 in expenses for a deficit of $4000 versus that $97000 in the bank. The other was $55000 in capital expenses, but they are clearly not spending that every year (depreciation is going to be closer to their average capital expense).
  - usr1106 4y ago
    Financial statements are always up to interpretations. But it's nice to see that they publish theirs very prominently. Not every open source community does.
- prometheanfire 4y ago
  This was an intentional large spend. Typically we have a large surplus every year and the money was just sitting around, growing. This year we decided to do something productive with some of it.
lmedinas 4y ago
Happy to see Gentoo Linux still -funroll-loops! As an old Gentoo Dev, its remarkable to see so many people giving love to this project. Too bad it lost popularity over the years but it has a very special place in my heart. I don't have any machine currently running Gentoo for many reasons but i'm sure sooner or later will find a machine to make some rice, -funroll-loops and relive some good moments from my youth.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I still use Gentoo for the reasons I started years ago: it’s possible to install what you want without what you don’t. RedHat wanted to install X for an update to mpg123 and that was the end for me.
Kukumber 4y ago
One of the best distro that offers an alternative to the bloated MS systemd OpenRC, https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC Thanks
- simoncion 4y ago
  > ...bloated MS systemd I dislike systemd as much as the next person who's gotten burned in production by systemd "quirks", but the correct epithet is "Poetteringware". systemd predates Poettering's hire by Microsoft, and Poettering's projects have a very particular style to them. (Namely, when they break, they break _badly_ and provide effectively-zero information to help you understand what went wrong and how to fix it... and advocates for the project that's giving you grief today either dismiss your questions as anti-$PROJECT FUD, or are just as helpless to understand why you're running into trouble as you are.)
  - bionade24 4y ago
    Please provide an actual example of systemd breaking which you experienced yourself. This generalised criticism mixed up with hate towards other software initiated by him long ago can't spawn any discussion and leaves your claims undisputable.
    - simoncion 4y ago
      Ah, you reminded me of thing c) that I encounter with Poetteringware: "Provide me with detailed examples of what went wrong... not because I'm interested in actually fixing your problem, but because I believe your complaints are fictional and you're actually engaging in character/project assassination." The specifics of the systemd breakage were subtle, complex, undocumented, and came out as part of working on proprietary software at my day job... so even if I could remember enough about the particulars to satisfy you, I'm not sure if my NDAs would permit me to talk about it. I do remember the NetworkManager breakage that caused me to notice that just using wpa_supplicant and friends was more than good enough, and the PulseAudio breakage that made me realize how much easier setting up jackd was than attempting to understand what was going wrong with PulseAudio. NetworkManager: For some damn reason, the software wouldn't stop attempting to assign an MTU of zero to my interfaces that had IPv6 enabled. This caused them to get the smallest-permitted MTU (IIRC, something like 1260), and -IIRC- some rather loud complaining in the logs. I found the relevant bug report, noticed the quality of developer conversation surrounding it, and decided to find alternatives. I did... wpa_supplicant + wpa_gui/wpa_cli for my wireless interfaces and the built-in Gentoo networking config files for my wired interface (which -in practice- means "use dhcpcd to get an IPv4 address, and SLAAC to get an IPv6 address"). PulseAudio: For some reason, after a PA upgrade, it started adding in an unpredictable and variable > 100ms of latency to my audio. This required manual adjustment to mplayer playback. Burned a long time (a week? more?) verifying that the problem was just in PA, and attempting to find out what might be causing it and how to fix it. PulseAudio users were utterly unhelpful. Decided to try using jackd, which -though initially difficult to understand- I found to be far, far easier to learn to configure and troubleshoot than PulseAudio. I've found that with Poetteringware, you're a fan... right up until the point at which it breaks and leaves you with effectively-zero information on what is going wrong and how to fix it, and/or you have a "use case" that the devs don't want to go to the trouble of handling. (This latter thing is often accompanied by assertions that the thing you want to do is a totally invalid thing that noone in their right mind would ever do, so do go away now.)
plaguepilled 4y ago
Clang as the main compiler? That is going to be a game changer for me. Kudos to the gentoo team!
- wheelerof4te 4y ago
  What are the benefits of using Clang over GCC?
  - eulers_secret 4y ago
    Only ones I can think of are that Clang has better(ish) error messages, and clangd language server is cool. Used to be Clang was faster than gcc (both compiling and the apps generated), but according to Wikipedia they now trade blows. Some people are very much against the GPL. I don’t know why they put corporate interests over users interests. I assume it’s a cousin to “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thought processes.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      > Some people are very much against the GPL. I don’t know why they put corporate interests over users interests. N=1, I like it when people make non-GNU systems work because I'm the kind of pendant who firmly believes that GNU!=Linux is a real and important distinction, and building Linux distros that aren't GNU forces the point. Unfortunately it appears that Gentoo relies on GNU coreutils, so this is just a baby step in that direction. On the other hand, Gentoo happily runs a prefix install on a lot of things that aren't Linux, and they have historically even run fully on a FreeBSD kernel, so they're still contributing from the other direction (Gentoo GNU/kFreeBSD, I guess). For nonGNU/Linux, Alpine is the reigning champion and Chimera looks super promising, but I'd love to see Gentoo as a good option.
  - yung_steezy 4y ago
    There is a bug which affects my Ryzen 5 2600 that means boost cannot compile with GCC using march=native. I'm fairly sure that switching to Clang will sort this out, so I'm looking forward to trying it out. Here's the bug if anyone is interested: https://bugs.gentoo.org/724314 https://bugs.gentoo.org/724314
wheelerof4te 4y ago
"Clang / LLVM as primary system compiler" What is the rationale behind this?
- toyg 4y ago
  From how I read it, it's an option, not an imposition. Some people have grown to really dislike GCC for one reason or another, so they get the chance to live without it as much as possible. Others will still be able to use GCC.
- snvzz 4y ago
  Gentoo supports several compilers as system compilers. Now Clang is an option, too.
  - wheelerof4te 4y ago
    Yes, that makes sense upon re-reading that portion.
patatita 4y ago
Ex-gentoo user here. In one of my ancient laptops, amd64 from 2006 maybe, the default kernel that came with the bootstrap Gentoo did not handle well throttling CPU speed. It was always by default to the maximum available and, thus, after some time the laptop would switch off itself because of excess heat. The only solution I found was to compile another kernel with the correct extensions loaded and put a big fan under the laptop during that process. Anyway, the situation was really funny for my coworkers but I learnt a lot of things thanks to Gentoo.
- nubinetwork 4y ago
  Was it an intel CPU? My laptop also had issues with throttling, but it turns out that turbo boost was on, and the BIOS had no way to turn it off. I wound up writing a cronjob that does "echo 1 > no_turbo" every minute... although it only really needs to be done once per boot, or every time you plug/unplug.
  - patatita 4y ago
    No, it was a AMD. I didn't found any way of solving it through the BIOS.
    - nubinetwork 4y ago
      Pretty sure there is an AMD no_turbo equivalent, but I don't know what it is off-hand... My 2950x had a BIOS toggle so it's locked to the base frequency.
seiferteric 4y ago
I used to use Gentoo back in ~2004-2009 (College years) then switched to Ubuntu when I started working and didn't have time to deal with it anymore. I recently built a ryzen 7950x & 7900 xt system however and found ubuntu didn't yet have the necessary drivers and also was thinking how to put my new system through its paces.. So I switched to gentoo and actually its pretty great. Things compile substantially faster on my 16 core 7950x than they did on my 2004 P4 system :) so its actually pretty usable. However my only gripe is when I suddenly realize I need to install something and don't want to wait around for it to compile, it can be a pain. Luckily there are often binary packages or even docker where I can jump into a debian container and do what I need. All in all its pretty good, but at some point I might switch to arch or even back to ubuntu if the next release supports my system better.
- HybridCurve 4y ago
  >However my only gripe is when I suddenly realize I need to install something and don't want to wait around for it to compile, it can be a pain. Yea, it's miserable to wait on building QT, or Boost to name a few. And, a while back I think emerged something that required Rust, so it wanted to build the version of llvm used to build rust, and then build rust. No thanks, rust-bin will do just fine for me.
  - seiferteric 4y ago
    Ya, those would be the ones you set loose before you go to bed and _hopefully_ will be done by the morning :) That being said, another thing I like about gentoo is how easy it is to be on the bleeding edge of certain packages, I run the latest -rc kernel (released each sunday usually) and mesa drivers. However I have to admit, even though gaming on linux is as good as it has ever been, I do the vast majority of gaming in windows still because I just don't want to deal with weird issues in my limited gaming time.
jsz0 4y ago
Using Gentoo as my primary desktop OS back in the mid-2000s taught me incredibly valuable problem solving skills. The lack of any safety net allowed me to break stuff in such unique ways I usually couldn't simply Google a quick fix. The only solution was digging into the details yourself and finding creative solutions.
lakomen 4y ago
I started my Linux life with Gentoo, rc4. Stage1 tarballs. Good times, many things learned. I've been using Gentoo on the server and every sync I pray that something doesn't change so that I'll have to spend a day dealing with the broken crap of package manager. Otoh my provider increased the server cost by 10 eur/ month so I'm recompiling packages just to drive up its energy cost, previously I did only necessary updates, now I'm running wild with compling weekly. Freaking Hetzner. 13 year old hardware renting for full price. Anyhow I wouldn't do Gentoo on the server again, but I'm stuck with it now, as it pretty much runs everything, mail, git, all kinds of databases, over 50 domains... If cloud wasn't so expensive compared I would've had a vps for each project. But migrating to cloud would cost 4 times as much and I'd have way less storage. Anyhow I digress, one of those days ... I'll habe to unweed my system so that depclean doesn't remove half the installed packages.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  > I've been using Gentoo on the server I don't know what "the server" is referring to but this almost feels irresponsible. If it is your personal server that's great but I can't remember a time I've been in a position professionally (where time is a resource/of the essence/being billed/we're up against a clock for a deadline) where tinkering at the distribution configuration level was ever a good idea.
  - seiferteric 4y ago
    Actually about 11-12 years ago I worked on a server in our validation lab, I think it was a video encoder for iptv and found that it used gentoo. They didn't compile on the server itself of course, but leveraged the flexible build system to apply patches etc and I assume built binaries in a repo somewhere where it could pull updates from.
  - lakomen 4y ago
    It was part of a trio that was interconnected via ipsec. The small cluster ran a mongodb replicaset and some Go backends and AngularJS frontends. I didn't really need them and I got rid of 2 servers. It's not irresponsible, I'm not a scrub and I won't be indirectly insulted.
gigatexal 4y ago
In the year 2023 and in light of things like Clear Linux (super optimized binaries, runs fast) and immutable setups like Nix who is using Gentoo and why?
- smegsicle 4y ago
  still probably the most sophisticated package manager, so if you think that sort of thing is neat
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Gentoo was always about flexibility more so than about performance in the first place
slicktux 4y ago
I remember getting into gentoo because I wanted to learn more about Linux (and operating systems in general) than I could using Ubuntu… I have to say the things I learned have greatly helped me. Anywhere from debugging to troubleshooting OS related problems…even in windows. One day I’ll make time to re install it on my box. RIP Griz64
peatmoss 4y ago
Was interesting to see a callout to Racket here. It looks like the Gentoo project has some Racket fans! https://gentoo-racket.gitlab.io//About.html https://gentoo-racket.gitlab.io//About.html
pmoriarty 4y ago
I used Gentoo from 2004 to last year. What finally drove me off of was the enormous amount of time it took to update my system (literally weeks on my old laptop) as it compiled all these enormously bloated apps. It was also super annoying to have to constantly keep updating or risk system breakage when you finally did try to update. That meant that my computer had to virtually never stop compiling to keep up with the endless updates. It was a complete waste of power, compute resources, and wear on my computer's components. I hate to admit it, but switching to a binary-only distro made almost all these headaches go away. I miss having the flexibility of Gentoo, but I don't miss endlessly compiling from source.
- mhss 4y ago
  As someone whose first Linux distribution was Gentoo back in 2005, what took you so long? I mean, it's always been a 'high maintenance' distribution. The appeal for me early on was that it forced me to understand more about how a Linux distribution worked, compiling different kernel options, etc. After a few years I moved to simpler distributions like CentOS, then Arch and finally just using MacOS to ssh to a VM with stable Debian releases.
- readingnews 4y ago
  Hrm, longtime gentoo user here, since 2002. I have used everything else, slack, redhat (since like the MIT TSX archive times, still have the floppies), debian, mandrake, SuSe, MX, Anti-X, Puppy, Yellow Dog. Those are distros I _used_ not installed for fun, but used for work or daily drivers. I am not sure why, but I keep going back to Gentoo. My main desktop at work and home is gentoo after a fairly long hiatus of Slack, Mint, MX. I think I see (with the exception of MX and Slack) a lot of distros going the way of "Windows" in their design choices towards users. If you are not a "power user" perhaps gentoo is not for you. I teach at a uni, and feel like if you are not a developer, perhaps most modern linux distros are for you... but if you are a developer, then perhaps something like Gentoo or Arch might be a good fit. NOT because you will be doing more work, but because a lot of the others are going towards spoon-fed operating systems that make too many choices for you, or phone home / make search suggestions too much for you. OTOH, perhaps you can stop emerging bloated apps. Or get something newer than a "old laptop". No one said you should recompile every dang linux package on machine that has a slower than everything else storage and bus because it is portable. Recall, you normally sacrifice for portability. I hope you continue to use linux, no matter the flavor, and to each his own, but I think many comments here are along the same thread: "I tried this free thing, where I could design it myself, build it all myself, and it was _work_ and I did not like it", when in reality the idea is "you have ultimate control, and it will cost you a little _work_, are you OK with that?"
throwaway9870 4y ago
Gentoo is fantastic for building a custom rootfs. I much prefer it to Buildroot or Yocto. Google uses the Gentoo package system for ChromeOS. Using the same portage file allows you to trivially pin the exact version of every installed package and if you cache the downloaded source files (/distfiles), you can reproduce the build anytime in the future.
- elcritch 4y ago
  Do you have good resource for how to do this?
- f1refly 4y ago
  Any suggestions how to get started building a cross rootfs with gentoo? My experience is limited to half a year of gentoo on my laptop in highschool, but I hate yocto with passion and would love to move to gentoo.
wheelerof4te 4y ago
It's good to see that those who want to build software from source, still have that option on the distribution level. Even in insert current year.
nbenitezl 4y ago
I used Gentoo around 2004/2005 and I keep very positive memories, I learnt a lot. Very attractive dist for developers because being source based, you can quickly test a patch in a system component (like eg. Wayland, Mutter, GDM) by just telling Portage (the package manager) to pick your patch and re-installing the package (re-emerging in Gentoo parlance). I even was able to contribute a patch for upstream Firefox that way (because compiling Firefox yourself from source is so much difficult). I also built my own kernel as Gentoo favors that. I remember tailoring the kernel to my hardware (picking only the kernel modules needed to my peripherals), my resulting kernel was about 2 MB in size, while the corresponding kernels at that time for Ubuntu or Fedora were around 20 MB (because they need to blindly include all peripherals which any user may have) that meant 18 MB less memory in RAM permanently (good for embedded and systems with constrained memory). After some years I end up switching to Fedora because I could not spend so much free time just maintaining my Gentoo distro (it's fun and you have so much control over your distro, but at the expense of more time spent on that).
from 4y ago
Gentoo is the only way to run Linux without dbus udev consolekit polkit and the rest of the annoying Freedesktop.org software. If you run GNOME or some giant desktop environment maybe that means nothing to you but it is very important for me.

146 points by jandeboevrie 4y ago

I love Gentoo. Used to be my daily distro up to 5/6 years ago, I moved to Arch out of laziness because it was not manageable to always recompile a lot of packages. I still have the same PC than at that time and from time to time wondering if I should give it a go again.

dewey 4y ago

It's good to see Gentoo going strong. It used to be my main server operating system, I have fond memories of recompiling everything because of some libc updates on my low powered Intel Atom based server.

danaos 4y ago
As someone who frequently recompiles ungoogled chrommium on arch, I hate to even imagine the pain of Gentoo.
- abrouwers 4y ago
  Funny, I'm the opposite - I use gentoo and don't mind, but only use -bin packages for browsers because they take too long :D
- japanman425 4y ago
  Why do you bother there are binaries or just use a different browser?

snvzz 4y ago

A pretty good year. I particularly enjoy the liveGUI iso and the clang as system compiler.

bitwize 4y ago

I bought a Compaq laptop with an AMD64 processor back in 2006, my first 64-bit machine. I put Gentoo on it to make sure I had 64-bit support for all the apps because the major distros at the time weren't all there yet. Man, that thing chugged to compile everything, but I was there... 64-bit everything!

Szpadel 4y ago

For me biggest killer feature in Gentoo would be decoupling building and installing process. eg. I run emerge on my low power laptop and it contacts my server to build binary packages with exact cflags and use flags requested by client. something jak distcc but on package level.

Pfiffer 4y ago
Someone has to have built some kind of automated binhost thing like this _somewhere_. I would love it if you could also do crossdev for Arm with it as well.
necrotic_comp 4y ago
This is distcc.
nix23 4y ago
That's exactly what i do with FreeBSD and Poudriere. I have a hetzner server that compiles ~all packages (ports) 24x7, optimized and customized for home and the business machines (Laptops, Servers(x64 and arm64), Workstations and jail-templates(x64 and arm64)) for two FreeBSD versions 12.x and 13.x RELEASE. Then on the machines i point the pkg-repo to it (the hetzner-server) and install it as binary pkg's ala ArchLinux.
chpatrick 4y ago
Nix can do that too.
hummus_bae 4y ago
That's precisely what RELM[1] does. [1] https://github.com/Falkorium/relm https://github.com/Falkorium/relm
- Szpadel 4y ago
  Mind double check url? Getting 404

plq 4y ago

Gentoo rocks. Installing Gentoo is a wonderful learning experience and it's the most flexible distro out there -- especially if you need to run a patched userland. Not mentioned: Gentoo Prefix project is useful for managing a Gentoo installation that is at a path other than /. We use it for building our Linux development environment. See [1] to give it a try. Warning! It will compile almost everything so it's going to take a bit of time! [1]: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix/Bootstrap#Performing_a_Gentoo_Prefix_bootstrap_using_the_interactive_installer_.28recommended.29 https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix/Bootstrap#Perfor...

Szpadel 4y ago
I tried to do something similar for building highly optimized and slimmed down (only use flags that are needed) for container images (installing with different root path) but got some library issues in resulting system and gave up. maybe I'll try the same with prefix. I'm curious if compiling everything with exact expected CPU and LTO would result in measurable performance gains.

Cockbrand 4y ago

I really loved Gentoo as my main distro around 2005 or so. It was so nicely customizable and (comparatively) bleeding-edge. But then compiling everything seemed so wasteful in terms of CPU time and power in the end. X.org or GCC updates had to run overnight because the computer was pretty much unusable while that happened. So I eventually switched to boring old Debian, which is so nice and simple. Still, good to see that it's still around, and there's an active community! I might even install it on some box I've got lying around.

rollcat 4y ago
> But then compiling everything seemed so wasteful in terms of CPU time and power in the end. Is there a solution to cache the build artefacts and/or share them between a fleet of machines? (inb4 nix)
- comboy 4y ago
  Yes, distcc. But builds are a pleasure with so many cores nowadays, there's also niceness options so even on the old machines you didn't need to suffer.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    Distcc moves the compilation somewhere else, ccache stores the compiled outputs, and both can work together. Although I'm not entirely sure how ccache works when all your clients use different CPUs. I only use distcc.
    - sagarm 4y ago
      I've found icecream to be a lot nicer since it handles toolchain distribution and scheduling.
leipie 4y ago

hanslub42 4y ago

I have been using Gentoo forever (actually since around 2005). It has always worked well for me, documentation is great (though I always take a look at the Arch documentation as well), it is extremely stable (even though I run the "unstable" version (~amd64) Th only thing that sometimes requires a bit of elbow grease is the update process (emerge @world) which can throw up large lists of "blockers", especially when some major component changes (like say the transition from python2 to python3). "eselect news" gives ample warning beforehand. This is the reason I never advise new linux users to use it, but I also don't see myself using any different distribution.

comboy 4y ago
I also started about that time and left it about 2 years ago. I've only reinstalled once during that time. But even on stable portage version these blocks are hell. Especially when you don't feel like toying with it for like a year and then it turns out that upgrade process requires packages versions which are not in the portage anymore etc. With all but the most popular hardware you are pretty much on your own. It usually drops down to getting some debian drivers and understanding your system. It's all doable, but it's time consuming. Still I don't think any distribution comes close to being so well organized and nice overall. It seems to take security seriously. It's just too bad that it became so unpopular. It's really hard to use it to a full potential without becoming a contributor nowadays. Which is fine if that's what you want to do but there are times when you want your OS to be your tool not your hobby. With more popularity it could be a very productive tool.
japanman425 4y ago
How unstable is ubuntu latest lts compared to this?
- simoncion 4y ago
  Over the two or four years I used Ubuntu, I burned more time fixing upgrade problems in Ubuntu than (barring the libpng nonsense way back in the day) I've spent fixing Gentoo upgrade problems since ~2004. I really, really, really wanted to be able to recommend Ubuntu, and for a long while it was REALLY good, so I could. But then something happened inside Canonical, (I guess they turned into clowns?) and they started releasing software that would just break _bad_ on upgrade. (In fact, had I not spent so much time developing my sysadmin skills with Gentoo, I would have been unable to recover from the upgrade problems I ran into.)

mrslave 4y ago

Recovering Gentoo user here. I have lost so many hours to the time sink that is incomplete system package updates on Gentoo. Moved to Nix and never looked back. On Nix either the install - and occasional build - succeeds and I enter the new environment, or it fails and I don't. In the worst case scenario where the build succeeds but something is funky I can just roll it back. Now I have all this free time to lose to the time sink that is learning how to package applications in the Nix language.

simoncion 4y ago
What do you mean by "incomplete system package updates"? I don't _think_ I've encountered any such thing in the past 10+ years, but my assumption of what you mean might be incorrect. (Other than rebuilding the three(!) copies of Chromium I have installed on my desktop, I don't remember encountering any notable packaging-related time sinks since the days of that nasty libpng upgrade way back when. IIRC, it was some terrible breaking change after an upgrade to 1.2 or 1.4 or some shit.)
- mid-kid 4y ago
  I recently wrote a quip about this on the gentoo forums: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1161242.html https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1161242.html Basically, portage only ensures package consistency at the start and the end of a portage package transaction (upgrade, install, removal). Anywhere in the middle, if anything fails, or your package upgrades take too damn long and you need to use your system in the meantime, the programs you use can be subtly broken. This is especially painful when upgrading between ecosystems of packages with modules that are version-bound to eachother. Think for example python upgrade, Qt upgrades and KDE upgrades, that will simply not run until the entire stack has finished upgrading. This is a problem that many distributions deal with, but the chances of failure in binary distributions are much smaller, and the time taken between the two states wherein your system is "consistent" is significantly shorter. It'd be nice if portage was able to use a temporary system to build packages in, and only install onto the running system once everything has finished upgrading. Unfortunately, designing machinery for this is complicated, and most veteran gentoo users will suggest you use a chroot or a separate system to build packages for the system you're using.

acomjean 4y ago

The finance section show they do a ton with very little but there maybe trouble ahead. $16,000 in revenue, approx 65,000 in expenses and a balance of 97,000 in the bank.

goodcanadian 4y ago
It is not quite so bad as that. They list $11000 in operating expenses and $9500 in depreciation, so more like $20500 in expenses for a deficit of $4000 versus that $97000 in the bank. The other was $55000 in capital expenses, but they are clearly not spending that every year (depreciation is going to be closer to their average capital expense).
- usr1106 4y ago
  Financial statements are always up to interpretations. But it's nice to see that they publish theirs very prominently. Not every open source community does.
prometheanfire 4y ago
This was an intentional large spend. Typically we have a large surplus every year and the money was just sitting around, growing. This year we decided to do something productive with some of it.

lmedinas 4y ago

Happy to see Gentoo Linux still -funroll-loops! As an old Gentoo Dev, its remarkable to see so many people giving love to this project. Too bad it lost popularity over the years but it has a very special place in my heart. I don't have any machine currently running Gentoo for many reasons but i'm sure sooner or later will find a machine to make some rice, -funroll-loops and relive some good moments from my youth.

bombcar 4y ago
I still use Gentoo for the reasons I started years ago: it’s possible to install what you want without what you don’t. RedHat wanted to install X for an update to mpg123 and that was the end for me.

Kukumber 4y ago

One of the best distro that offers an alternative to the bloated MS systemd OpenRC, https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/OpenRC Thanks

simoncion 4y ago
> ...bloated MS systemd I dislike systemd as much as the next person who's gotten burned in production by systemd "quirks", but the correct epithet is "Poetteringware". systemd predates Poettering's hire by Microsoft, and Poettering's projects have a very particular style to them. (Namely, when they break, they break _badly_ and provide effectively-zero information to help you understand what went wrong and how to fix it... and advocates for the project that's giving you grief today either dismiss your questions as anti-$PROJECT FUD, or are just as helpless to understand why you're running into trouble as you are.)
- bionade24 4y ago
  Please provide an actual example of systemd breaking which you experienced yourself. This generalised criticism mixed up with hate towards other software initiated by him long ago can't spawn any discussion and leaves your claims undisputable.
  - simoncion 4y ago
    Ah, you reminded me of thing c) that I encounter with Poetteringware: "Provide me with detailed examples of what went wrong... not because I'm interested in actually fixing your problem, but because I believe your complaints are fictional and you're actually engaging in character/project assassination." The specifics of the systemd breakage were subtle, complex, undocumented, and came out as part of working on proprietary software at my day job... so even if I could remember enough about the particulars to satisfy you, I'm not sure if my NDAs would permit me to talk about it. I do remember the NetworkManager breakage that caused me to notice that just using wpa_supplicant and friends was more than good enough, and the PulseAudio breakage that made me realize how much easier setting up jackd was than attempting to understand what was going wrong with PulseAudio. NetworkManager: For some damn reason, the software wouldn't stop attempting to assign an MTU of zero to my interfaces that had IPv6 enabled. This caused them to get the smallest-permitted MTU (IIRC, something like 1260), and -IIRC- some rather loud complaining in the logs. I found the relevant bug report, noticed the quality of developer conversation surrounding it, and decided to find alternatives. I did... wpa_supplicant + wpa_gui/wpa_cli for my wireless interfaces and the built-in Gentoo networking config files for my wired interface (which -in practice- means "use dhcpcd to get an IPv4 address, and SLAAC to get an IPv6 address"). PulseAudio: For some reason, after a PA upgrade, it started adding in an unpredictable and variable > 100ms of latency to my audio. This required manual adjustment to mplayer playback. Burned a long time (a week? more?) verifying that the problem was just in PA, and attempting to find out what might be causing it and how to fix it. PulseAudio users were utterly unhelpful. Decided to try using jackd, which -though initially difficult to understand- I found to be far, far easier to learn to configure and troubleshoot than PulseAudio. I've found that with Poetteringware, you're a fan... right up until the point at which it breaks and leaves you with effectively-zero information on what is going wrong and how to fix it, and/or you have a "use case" that the devs don't want to go to the trouble of handling. (This latter thing is often accompanied by assertions that the thing you want to do is a totally invalid thing that noone in their right mind would ever do, so do go away now.)

plaguepilled 4y ago

Clang as the main compiler? That is going to be a game changer for me. Kudos to the gentoo team!

wheelerof4te 4y ago
What are the benefits of using Clang over GCC?
- eulers_secret 4y ago
  Only ones I can think of are that Clang has better(ish) error messages, and clangd language server is cool. Used to be Clang was faster than gcc (both compiling and the apps generated), but according to Wikipedia they now trade blows. Some people are very much against the GPL. I don’t know why they put corporate interests over users interests. I assume it’s a cousin to “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” thought processes.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    > Some people are very much against the GPL. I don’t know why they put corporate interests over users interests. N=1, I like it when people make non-GNU systems work because I'm the kind of pendant who firmly believes that GNU!=Linux is a real and important distinction, and building Linux distros that aren't GNU forces the point. Unfortunately it appears that Gentoo relies on GNU coreutils, so this is just a baby step in that direction. On the other hand, Gentoo happily runs a prefix install on a lot of things that aren't Linux, and they have historically even run fully on a FreeBSD kernel, so they're still contributing from the other direction (Gentoo GNU/kFreeBSD, I guess). For nonGNU/Linux, Alpine is the reigning champion and Chimera looks super promising, but I'd love to see Gentoo as a good option.
- yung_steezy 4y ago
  There is a bug which affects my Ryzen 5 2600 that means boost cannot compile with GCC using march=native. I'm fairly sure that switching to Clang will sort this out, so I'm looking forward to trying it out. Here's the bug if anyone is interested: https://bugs.gentoo.org/724314 https://bugs.gentoo.org/724314

wheelerof4te 4y ago

"Clang / LLVM as primary system compiler" What is the rationale behind this?

toyg 4y ago
From how I read it, it's an option, not an imposition. Some people have grown to really dislike GCC for one reason or another, so they get the chance to live without it as much as possible. Others will still be able to use GCC.
snvzz 4y ago
Gentoo supports several compilers as system compilers. Now Clang is an option, too.
- wheelerof4te 4y ago
  Yes, that makes sense upon re-reading that portion.

patatita 4y ago

Ex-gentoo user here. In one of my ancient laptops, amd64 from 2006 maybe, the default kernel that came with the bootstrap Gentoo did not handle well throttling CPU speed. It was always by default to the maximum available and, thus, after some time the laptop would switch off itself because of excess heat. The only solution I found was to compile another kernel with the correct extensions loaded and put a big fan under the laptop during that process. Anyway, the situation was really funny for my coworkers but I learnt a lot of things thanks to Gentoo.

nubinetwork 4y ago
Was it an intel CPU? My laptop also had issues with throttling, but it turns out that turbo boost was on, and the BIOS had no way to turn it off. I wound up writing a cronjob that does "echo 1 > no_turbo" every minute... although it only really needs to be done once per boot, or every time you plug/unplug.
- patatita 4y ago
  No, it was a AMD. I didn't found any way of solving it through the BIOS.
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    Pretty sure there is an AMD no_turbo equivalent, but I don't know what it is off-hand... My 2950x had a BIOS toggle so it's locked to the base frequency.

seiferteric 4y ago

I used to use Gentoo back in ~2004-2009 (College years) then switched to Ubuntu when I started working and didn't have time to deal with it anymore. I recently built a ryzen 7950x & 7900 xt system however and found ubuntu didn't yet have the necessary drivers and also was thinking how to put my new system through its paces.. So I switched to gentoo and actually its pretty great. Things compile substantially faster on my 16 core 7950x than they did on my 2004 P4 system :) so its actually pretty usable. However my only gripe is when I suddenly realize I need to install something and don't want to wait around for it to compile, it can be a pain. Luckily there are often binary packages or even docker where I can jump into a debian container and do what I need. All in all its pretty good, but at some point I might switch to arch or even back to ubuntu if the next release supports my system better.

HybridCurve 4y ago
>However my only gripe is when I suddenly realize I need to install something and don't want to wait around for it to compile, it can be a pain. Yea, it's miserable to wait on building QT, or Boost to name a few. And, a while back I think emerged something that required Rust, so it wanted to build the version of llvm used to build rust, and then build rust. No thanks, rust-bin will do just fine for me.
- seiferteric 4y ago
  Ya, those would be the ones you set loose before you go to bed and _hopefully_ will be done by the morning :) That being said, another thing I like about gentoo is how easy it is to be on the bleeding edge of certain packages, I run the latest -rc kernel (released each sunday usually) and mesa drivers. However I have to admit, even though gaming on linux is as good as it has ever been, I do the vast majority of gaming in windows still because I just don't want to deal with weird issues in my limited gaming time.

jsz0 4y ago

Using Gentoo as my primary desktop OS back in the mid-2000s taught me incredibly valuable problem solving skills. The lack of any safety net allowed me to break stuff in such unique ways I usually couldn't simply Google a quick fix. The only solution was digging into the details yourself and finding creative solutions.

lakomen 4y ago

I started my Linux life with Gentoo, rc4. Stage1 tarballs. Good times, many things learned. I've been using Gentoo on the server and every sync I pray that something doesn't change so that I'll have to spend a day dealing with the broken crap of package manager. Otoh my provider increased the server cost by 10 eur/ month so I'm recompiling packages just to drive up its energy cost, previously I did only necessary updates, now I'm running wild with compling weekly. Freaking Hetzner. 13 year old hardware renting for full price. Anyhow I wouldn't do Gentoo on the server again, but I'm stuck with it now, as it pretty much runs everything, mail, git, all kinds of databases, over 50 domains... If cloud wasn't so expensive compared I would've had a vps for each project. But migrating to cloud would cost 4 times as much and I'd have way less storage. Anyhow I digress, one of those days ... I'll habe to unweed my system so that depclean doesn't remove half the installed packages.

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
> I've been using Gentoo on the server I don't know what "the server" is referring to but this almost feels irresponsible. If it is your personal server that's great but I can't remember a time I've been in a position professionally (where time is a resource/of the essence/being billed/we're up against a clock for a deadline) where tinkering at the distribution configuration level was ever a good idea.
- seiferteric 4y ago
  Actually about 11-12 years ago I worked on a server in our validation lab, I think it was a video encoder for iptv and found that it used gentoo. They didn't compile on the server itself of course, but leveraged the flexible build system to apply patches etc and I assume built binaries in a repo somewhere where it could pull updates from.
- lakomen 4y ago
  It was part of a trio that was interconnected via ipsec. The small cluster ran a mongodb replicaset and some Go backends and AngularJS frontends. I didn't really need them and I got rid of 2 servers. It's not irresponsible, I'm not a scrub and I won't be indirectly insulted.

gigatexal 4y ago

In the year 2023 and in light of things like Clear Linux (super optimized binaries, runs fast) and immutable setups like Nix who is using Gentoo and why?

smegsicle 4y ago
still probably the most sophisticated package manager, so if you think that sort of thing is neat
michaelmrose 4y ago
Gentoo was always about flexibility more so than about performance in the first place

slicktux 4y ago

I remember getting into gentoo because I wanted to learn more about Linux (and operating systems in general) than I could using Ubuntu… I have to say the things I learned have greatly helped me. Anywhere from debugging to troubleshooting OS related problems…even in windows. One day I’ll make time to re install it on my box. RIP Griz64

peatmoss 4y ago

Was interesting to see a callout to Racket here. It looks like the Gentoo project has some Racket fans! https://gentoo-racket.gitlab.io//About.html https://gentoo-racket.gitlab.io//About.html

pmoriarty 4y ago

I used Gentoo from 2004 to last year. What finally drove me off of was the enormous amount of time it took to update my system (literally weeks on my old laptop) as it compiled all these enormously bloated apps. It was also super annoying to have to constantly keep updating or risk system breakage when you finally did try to update. That meant that my computer had to virtually never stop compiling to keep up with the endless updates. It was a complete waste of power, compute resources, and wear on my computer's components. I hate to admit it, but switching to a binary-only distro made almost all these headaches go away. I miss having the flexibility of Gentoo, but I don't miss endlessly compiling from source.

mhss 4y ago
As someone whose first Linux distribution was Gentoo back in 2005, what took you so long? I mean, it's always been a 'high maintenance' distribution. The appeal for me early on was that it forced me to understand more about how a Linux distribution worked, compiling different kernel options, etc. After a few years I moved to simpler distributions like CentOS, then Arch and finally just using MacOS to ssh to a VM with stable Debian releases.
readingnews 4y ago
Hrm, longtime gentoo user here, since 2002. I have used everything else, slack, redhat (since like the MIT TSX archive times, still have the floppies), debian, mandrake, SuSe, MX, Anti-X, Puppy, Yellow Dog. Those are distros I _used_ not installed for fun, but used for work or daily drivers. I am not sure why, but I keep going back to Gentoo. My main desktop at work and home is gentoo after a fairly long hiatus of Slack, Mint, MX. I think I see (with the exception of MX and Slack) a lot of distros going the way of "Windows" in their design choices towards users. If you are not a "power user" perhaps gentoo is not for you. I teach at a uni, and feel like if you are not a developer, perhaps most modern linux distros are for you... but if you are a developer, then perhaps something like Gentoo or Arch might be a good fit. NOT because you will be doing more work, but because a lot of the others are going towards spoon-fed operating systems that make too many choices for you, or phone home / make search suggestions too much for you. OTOH, perhaps you can stop emerging bloated apps. Or get something newer than a "old laptop". No one said you should recompile every dang linux package on machine that has a slower than everything else storage and bus because it is portable. Recall, you normally sacrifice for portability. I hope you continue to use linux, no matter the flavor, and to each his own, but I think many comments here are along the same thread: "I tried this free thing, where I could design it myself, build it all myself, and it was _work_ and I did not like it", when in reality the idea is "you have ultimate control, and it will cost you a little _work_, are you OK with that?"

throwaway9870 4y ago

Gentoo is fantastic for building a custom rootfs. I much prefer it to Buildroot or Yocto. Google uses the Gentoo package system for ChromeOS. Using the same portage file allows you to trivially pin the exact version of every installed package and if you cache the downloaded source files (/distfiles), you can reproduce the build anytime in the future.

elcritch 4y ago
Do you have good resource for how to do this?
f1refly 4y ago
Any suggestions how to get started building a cross rootfs with gentoo? My experience is limited to half a year of gentoo on my laptop in highschool, but I hate yocto with passion and would love to move to gentoo.

wheelerof4te 4y ago

It's good to see that those who want to build software from source, still have that option on the distribution level. Even in insert current year.

nbenitezl 4y ago

I used Gentoo around 2004/2005 and I keep very positive memories, I learnt a lot. Very attractive dist for developers because being source based, you can quickly test a patch in a system component (like eg. Wayland, Mutter, GDM) by just telling Portage (the package manager) to pick your patch and re-installing the package (re-emerging in Gentoo parlance). I even was able to contribute a patch for upstream Firefox that way (because compiling Firefox yourself from source is so much difficult). I also built my own kernel as Gentoo favors that. I remember tailoring the kernel to my hardware (picking only the kernel modules needed to my peripherals), my resulting kernel was about 2 MB in size, while the corresponding kernels at that time for Ubuntu or Fedora were around 20 MB (because they need to blindly include all peripherals which any user may have) that meant 18 MB less memory in RAM permanently (good for embedded and systems with constrained memory). After some years I end up switching to Fedora because I could not spend so much free time just maintaining my Gentoo distro (it's fun and you have so much control over your distro, but at the expense of more time spent on that).

from 4y ago

Gentoo is the only way to run Linux without dbus udev consolekit polkit and the rest of the annoying Freedesktop.org software. If you run GNOME or some giant desktop environment maybe that means nothing to you but it is very important for me.