7 ms·

Years ago, somehow, I wasted hours and days of computer and my time, compiling and fine tuning my gentoo system, god knows why, when next day I anyway format it

• mad182 3y ago
  I too used to obsess over customizing my OS. Now I just install Debian, a handful of programs I use daily and that's it. I can recreate my setup on another machine in 20 minutes.
  • subtra3t 3y ago
    What handful of programs do you use daily, if you don't mind sharing?
    • mad182 3y ago
      Nothing interesting. I spend like 99% of my computer time in the web browser, ide and terminal. Chrome, git, ssh, docker, netbeans
      • bitcharmer 3y ago
        Oh wow, I did not expect to see NetBeans here. What do you use it for and why NetBeans?
        • mad182 3y ago
          General web development. PHP, javascript, css. I used to do some java projects as well, but not lately. I know it's not mainstream to use NetBeans these days, but I don't care, I'm just used to it and it gets the job done. Maybe I'm just getting old.
          • bitcharmer 3y ago
            Thanks for answering. I'm not NetBeans fan myself but there's absolutely nothing wrong with using the tools you like that get the job done.
  • zaknenou 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • mad182 3y ago
      Not sure if you mean that sarcastically, but it's a really boring and stable OS, the setup is just a few clicks and hitting enter a few times. I think I haven't even bothered to change the wallpaper on my newest laptop. There's nothing really special about Debian as well, it could as well be Ubuntu, Mint or anything else that's plug n play. I'm just used to Debian, and it comes with less junk I don't need installed by default.
      • doubled112 3y ago
        Debian is my set and forget OS as well. After running my home servers on it, one release wasn't too far behind to run as a desktop, and I've been happy here ever since. Xfce desktop, move the panel to the bottom, install applications. Use it for the next days/months/years until I decide to look around again.
    • bayindirh 3y ago
      Of course you customize your Debian installation over time. Over time is the key here. A package here, a small config there, and after some time, that installation becomes so unique that it starts reading your mind. Non-breaking updates is the icing on the cake. The biggest point is you install Debian once, or when your processor architecture changes. --Sent from my a 6 year old Debian installation.
  • calvinmorrison 3y ago
    They talk about the shell as an IDE. My entire desktop is a 14 year experiment in tuning productivity. My ~/bin/ folder has around 100 scripts and maybe 20 are little scripts i wrote in conjunction with i3. Pretty cool how it stacks up over time
  • sergiomattei 3y ago
    Same but with macOS. The only cool thing about it is that it’s declarative: nix-darwin everything and a fully working and customized machine is up in 10 minutes with one command
    • doublepg23 3y ago
      Do you have some docs or writeups on your setup? I'm planning to move to macOS in a few weeks.
• teekert 3y ago
  You and me both. But, we learned a lot. Nowadays I feel like Linux is my super power, OS, VM, Container, Nix-shell, WSL2. It’s all Linux. And you can drop me on any command line (even a BSD one to some extent) and I will feel at home and can solve problems. I’d like to think that’s where my happy time with Gentoo led to.
  • jstummbillig 3y ago
    And no matter if its true (and it might well be!) the overarching tendency to look for reasons to explain time spent with Gentoo should probably tell us something. At best, we are at least a bit confused about it all.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      I never used Gentoo, but the time I spend screwing around in Arch was more educational than the video games I would have been playing, anyway.
    • teekert 3y ago
      I had fun.
    • teekert 3y ago
      I was confusing because you can’t install it without understanding stuff like fstab, grub, user creation etc. It sets you up to be a sysadmin, it requires you to be a sysadmin. Ubuntu on the other hand, looks and acts more like an iPad than Windows.
  • oblio 3y ago
    I agree with you, but we're also lucky (or unlucky?) that the variety of out there's dropped a ton. If you can, try to get access to OpenVMS or Cisco IOS, it's an entirely different world in terms of user experience.
• dexterbt1 3y ago
  Same, this was around 2004-2006ish when I maintained a Gentoo build for my Pentium 4 box. There was this somewhat draw to me of compiling my own binaries highly optimized to my processor and that Portage mostly works. But my gosh, gcc build times are killing the fun. When Ubuntu arrived and saw my peers being productive, I switched.
• netdur 3y ago
  I had toshiba satellite with some whooping 96MB RAM... as main computer even... happily ran Windows 98... them I got the book "Linux from scratch" the rest is history... now I am happy mac user.
  • BSDobelix 3y ago
    Have you try'd "MacOS from scratch"? It's even harder ;)
• toyg 3y ago
  When every ounce of power mattered, fine-tuning your OS made sense. Nowadays most people are swimming in CPU cores and gigabytes of ram and terabytes of solid-state memory, so fine-tuning is a waste of time (unless you play bleeding-edge games). But it wasn't always such.
  • nottorp 3y ago
    > so fine-tuning is a waste of time (unless you play bleeding-edge games). Unless you run javascript 'applications'. Games are already optimized.
    • Zambyte 3y ago
      > Games are already optimized. What AAA titles have you played around launch in the last 5 or so years?
    • hermitdev 3y ago
      > Games are already optimized. Yeah, I'm calling bullshit on this one. At least, it doesn't line up with my experience. In my experience, games are optimized _just enough_ for a decent playing experience (and not always then). Games devs, as a whole, are the worst offenders of expecting their users to just throw more money (hardware) at the software to achieve usable/enjoyable experiences. There are, of course, exceptions. But, for every Carmack, there's 10s of thousands of developers scrambling to make their deadline, doing just enough to ship.
      • II2II 3y ago
        I have heard of people recompiling the kernel to improve gaming performance (mostly to use a different scheduler or what be it), but don't recall seeing anything beyond single digit percentage improvements in performance. Which makes sense, since you can only recompile the kernel and a subset of open source libraries that the game may use. Those are going to be fairly well optimized to start with. The games themselves though are a different story. Outside of open sources games (which are usually less demanding than commercial ones), you don't have the source code to rebuild it. Even if you did, enabling optimizations beyond what the developer used risks breakage so you will have to do your own testing. Even then, simply rebuilding the software wouldn't address the quality of the code created by those developers who are scrambling to meet a deadline with as little effort as possible.
• bombcar 3y ago
  Gentoo’s biggest attraction for me was always the USE flags - being able to turn off the X integration of mpg123 where CentOS demanded an entire X install to get the command line player. The flags were just icing on that cake.
• pjmlp 3y ago
  The time I wasted with Gentoo in 2004 was enough to never try it again. A full day compiling stuff only for the base install, let alone everything else I would eventually need. On my case, I decided to become another Scientific Linux tester.
  • oblio 3y ago
    The thing is, that was 20 years ago. I basically did the same thing, at almost the same time, as you. But computing power is much higher now. The same compilation now would probably take 1-2 hours, max. Updates would be super fast. Gentoo itself is considered generally stable and a pretty solid distribution, or it used to be. I wonder if these days the flexibility and the engineering behind Gentoo might be worth taking another go at it.
    • pjmlp 3y ago
      Even 1-2 hours is too much for me. I rather use programming languages ecosystems that favour binary libraries for a reason.
      • II2II 3y ago
        A lot of the reason depends upon what you hope to get from the labour and the overall environment that you are working within. I was working with a 486 around 1995. Compiling your own software was the norm and compiling your own kernel could have significant performance benefits (even if it was just to conserve the limited memory supported by machines of the day, to head off some of the swapping). By the time I learned of Gentoo, that was not really the case: most of the software one could obtain was provided in binary form and compiler optimizations were much less relevant (unless you had a special workload). The tooling provided is important too. I was using NetBSD for a while. For the most part you just started the compilation process and walked away until it was done. (I imagine Portage is similar.) You didn't get the instant gratification, but it was not time intensive in the sense that you had to attend to the process. That was very much unlike my earlier experiences in compiling software for Linux, stuff that isn't in the repos, since it did have to be attended to.
• skriticos2 3y ago
  Yea, same here back in the day. Stage 1 installations for Gentoo really made me interact with the kernel and software in a different way. It did not just work, but while solving the issues, I learned a lot on how things worked internally. It's a great thing to get really familiar with the workings under the hood. But yea, now-a-days I'm on Ubuntu LTS.
• goalieca 3y ago
  On my first pc assembled from used parts, I was able to squeeze every bit of compute out of gentoo. Being able to build smaller binaries by excluding dependencies seemed to help a lot. I used it until the first ubuntu was released and it just worked and worked well. The only problem was that it was an ugly brown.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  But then you have to deal with big upgrades that might break your system and old packages (or start randomly adding PPAs etc.) A rolling distro means you can continually keep up with small changes and only adopt big new pieces (like systemd, pipewire, wayland etc.) if/when you are ready to. I've installed Gentoo literally two times. Once per PC. Been using it for years. It's not like you have to keep tweaking it. It does help if you run a basic system like me, though (no DE, simple tiling WM, don't use much apart from Emacs and Firefox).
• Maken 3y ago
  I never used gentoo. Making sure the graphic and wifi card in a laptop worked after every upddate on Ubuntu was hard enough for me.
• hylaride 3y ago
  Same, but I learned so much while doing it. Eventually I got tired and moved to an arch and got most of the same without always fighting broken packages. But I still use the knowledge I gained dealing with random low-level issues when they crop up.
  • zamadatix 3y ago
    I had a similar experience with the Gentoos/Arches of the world. I'd never use Gentoo or a Gentoo-like as my primary OS for anything, likely for the rest of my life, but it still ended up being one of the most valuable operating systems for me to spend some time on.
• Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Everyone please realize that just because you did something and no longer do that thing does not mean it was wrong to have done that thing. All of us who at one point compiled our own kernels and now no longer do, are the killers that we are partly because we did things like that at least for a bit. It only makes sense not to now, after having done it. It's not true to suggest (or to read these stories as a new bystander and come away with the idea that) "if I were smarter I never would have wasted time on that"
  • twosdai 3y ago
    I hear your point that the act or process of doing the learning is good, even if the end result is that you shouldn't do the thing again. Such as learning assembly but then only doing web development for a profession where you don't need to know assembly. However, I think that the statement below might be better with a bit of nuance. > It's not true to suggest (or to read these stories as a new bystander and come away with the idea that) "if I were smarter I never would have wasted time on that" I would say its "not true always," in some cases doing the action really wasn't worth the time. Related to this, I believe the sentiment people have about regretting wasting time on some endevour, is a misalignment of what their intention was to begin with. For example, if someone wanted to compile their own kernal because they wanted to learn and understand more about their computer its unlikely that they would walk away from that experience with regret. However if they wanted to compile their own kernal because they believed that in doing so they would make 10x more money in the long run (through learning so much), and that goal failed to materialize. They would likely tell others to not waste their time learning to compile their own kernal. Not trying to be pedantic, or argumentative, I aggree with your point deeply, however I wanted to discuss it a bit further. Let me know your thoughts.