Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
How exactly? On idle Gentoo uses almost no resouces comapred to Windows 11 for example. If you’re on about needing to compile every package, then think how often is someone actually installing a new package and for how long is the processor working to do that? Also on a binary distro, then large servers are used to compile every last package, no matter how big or small, in that distro’s repos, then more machines are used to provide those binaries to the users.
The whole pipeline for Gentoo is much simpler, the end user’s system is a lot simpler and uses far less resources.
They are referring to the fact that Gentoo compiles everything from source rather than shipping binaries. This creates a lot of duplicated work between every user. But it’s not just for nothing. You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries and they are optimized for your system. It is a trade off.
Do you, though? Do you check e-signatures and do you look at the every row of the code?
Well, you have the opportunity to. The fact that it is compiled on your system already gives you a lot of discretion. You can at least see what code is going into the compiler locally.
This is true. In theory its the best way, but ita crazy to think compiling Firefox can take like multiple hours of full computing power. And I like to update my software a lot.
Lets do a small comparison:
Linux power efficiency tier list
Desktops / WMs
Packaging
Distro type
Behavior
So uhm I guess I should switch to Debian 12, update once a week and go out on a hike or something.
It’s not duplicated work, because it’s optimized for your system and usage. If it was actually duplicated it wouldn’t be any better than Debian plus waiting 20 minutes every time you use apt.
Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.
I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.
These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.
Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.
Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.
Interesting, in my experience apps use either GTK or KDE and often KDE just uses GTK? I dont know how this works on GNOME, I guess it forces GTK somehow anyways.
Not technical enough to understand the rest haha.
It’s fluff these fays if you’re talking about optimizing for speed… unless you’re using very specific hardware for a specific purpose. But if you want to compile in support for something you want to be able to do that most people wouldn’t need, then yeah it’s a real advantage.