3 ms·

Hold up we're talking about Nix not Rust ! (yeah sorry couldn't resist, I know this is probably misleading)

by Reventlov 4y ago

speed_spread 4y ago
And here I was thinking about Gentoo...
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Oh that takes me back to trying to explain to some Gentoo users back in the day that that yea you can optimise stuff better for your slow ass computer. But you now have to spend most of your time compiling code on your slow ass computer. I always found Arch to be a much more reasonable system for this use case because compiling everything from scratch was just pointless, at least back then. But it still maoes it easy to rebuild packages with custom patches etc.
  - CuriousCosmic 4y ago
    > Oh that takes me back to trying to explain to some Gentoo users back in the day that that yea you can optimise stuff better for your slow ass computer. But you now have to spend most of your time compiling code on your slow ass computer. Honestly it depends what your goal is with gentoo. My whole sell with gentoo is that custom packages are just so easy. I can take some garbage toolchain from an embedded manufacturer and wire up an ebuild for it that "just works". Nix is similar once you get it working but the nixpkg and nixos DSLs just kinda suck in their own ways. So it may take me 10-15 min to write and install an ebuild while the nix package may take me an hour or two. Same goes for situations where you need weird kernel configs. It's so easy to just recompile the kernel on gentoo once you have stuff set up. The OS is built expecting a majority of users will want to tweak their kernels so the OS's tooling doesn't fight you when you do. I find this often less well handled in other distros. As for arch, it is pretty close IMHO but (while it may have changed since I used it last) I found that the "bleeding-edge" focus makes dealing with old janky dependencies to be pretty painful. Gentoo certainly isn't the first choice for the majority of people but it IMHO is a really good choice if you are going to be working with funky proprietary toolchains (o/ hi embedded engs).

Hold up we're talking about Nix not Rust ! (yeah sorry couldn't resist, I know this is probably misleading)

speed_spread 4y ago

And here I was thinking about Gentoo...

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Oh that takes me back to trying to explain to some Gentoo users back in the day that that yea you can optimise stuff better for your slow ass computer. But you now have to spend most of your time compiling code on your slow ass computer. I always found Arch to be a much more reasonable system for this use case because compiling everything from scratch was just pointless, at least back then. But it still maoes it easy to rebuild packages with custom patches etc.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  > Oh that takes me back to trying to explain to some Gentoo users back in the day that that yea you can optimise stuff better for your slow ass computer. But you now have to spend most of your time compiling code on your slow ass computer. Honestly it depends what your goal is with gentoo. My whole sell with gentoo is that custom packages are just so easy. I can take some garbage toolchain from an embedded manufacturer and wire up an ebuild for it that "just works". Nix is similar once you get it working but the nixpkg and nixos DSLs just kinda suck in their own ways. So it may take me 10-15 min to write and install an ebuild while the nix package may take me an hour or two. Same goes for situations where you need weird kernel configs. It's so easy to just recompile the kernel on gentoo once you have stuff set up. The OS is built expecting a majority of users will want to tweak their kernels so the OS's tooling doesn't fight you when you do. I find this often less well handled in other distros. As for arch, it is pretty close IMHO but (while it may have changed since I used it last) I found that the "bleeding-edge" focus makes dealing with old janky dependencies to be pretty painful. Gentoo certainly isn't the first choice for the majority of people but it IMHO is a really good choice if you are going to be working with funky proprietary toolchains (o/ hi embedded engs).