3 ms·

"I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted t

by kenko 13y ago

"I started out with Gentoo, maybe 10 years ago. It was the coolest thing, but later realized that I was spending a lot of time compiling everything and wanted these magical things called "binaries" instead." I'm using Gentoo and I don't really notice this, but that's probably because my needs are fairly minimal and I take the approach of "if it's working, don't change it". Unless I happen to upgrade to something that requires a new version of a library that then breaks other things that were linking to it, setting of a chain of forced recompilation, I don't really spend much time compiling at all. (Amortized time compiling, in light of the library issue just mentioned, might still be high.) Curious what other Gentoo users' perceptions of time spent compiling is.

2bluesc 13y ago
Ha. I felt like that's all I ever did was compile with Gentoo, and some how that was cool. Now if Ubuntu would integrate systemd I'd stop considering fedora.
gnosis 13y ago
You have to compile quite a lot just to keep up on Gentoo. If you don't, your system will fall out of sync with the packages that are in portage, and trying to install new software and keeping your system running will be painful at best. In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.
memset 13y ago
When installing a new gentoo system, you basically let it compile overnight. When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured. (I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.) I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.

by kenko 13y ago

2bluesc 13y ago

Ha. I felt like that's all I ever did was compile with Gentoo, and some how that was cool. Now if Ubuntu would integrate systemd I'd stop considering fedora.

gnosis 13y ago

You have to compile quite a lot just to keep up on Gentoo. If you don't, your system will fall out of sync with the packages that are in portage, and trying to install new software and keeping your system running will be painful at best. In my opinion, this is Gentoo's greatest weakness. I don't really see a way around it, however, short of the Gentoo team somehow getting the resources to mirror every version of every package in portage.

memset 13y ago

When installing a new gentoo system, you basically let it compile overnight. When something was broken - let's say X11 wouldn't start - the first thing you'd try is "re-emerge X." 2 hours later, the display is still broken and only later do you realize you had xorg.conf misconfigured. (I think all of the auto configuration for displays is great, by the way. But on the occasion it doesn't work, I wish I could just edit xorg.conf, but of course that doesn't even exist any more because everything is autodetected by default.) I loved the idea of USE flags, until I realized that they were just a wrapper around ./configure options.