[HN Gopher] 20 Years of Gentoo
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20 Years of Gentoo
Author : BeetleB
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-05-18 15:25 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nawaz.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nawaz.org)
| belfalas wrote:
| I had a colleague once who was a real Linux geek, knew so many
| distros, compiled the kernel himself, etc.
|
| His comment on Gentoo: "Dude, Gentoo. That's for the kind of
| people who mod their cars."
| LanternLight83 wrote:
| I used Gentoo for over a year, from at least early April 2020
| until my migration to GNU Guix in early December 2022. Got into
| DWM, LTO, minimal systems. It taught me more than any other
| distro, and there's still a lot I miss about Portage and the
| Gentoo community. Still use `functions.sh` to style my personal
| Bash scripts. Functional package managers have not nurtured the
| same culture around diverse USE flag support and quality packages
| + docs, and I wish I could just glue them together. Some day.
| imran-iq wrote:
| Good news! One of the Google Summer of Code projects for Guix
| is indeed adding something similar to the USE flags (called
| Parametrized Packages)[0]
|
| ---
|
| 0: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-
| devel/2023-05/msg001...
| chpatrick wrote:
| I went through the slackware Gentoo arch nixos path and now I
| don't think there's any reason to use gentoo over nixos.
| smetj wrote:
| Gentoo's artwork and color schemes were and still are quite
| pleasant.
| behnamoh wrote:
| Unfortunately, for the ordinary user, the best solution still is
| Ubuntu, esp. if you're doing ML work, most tools assume you're
| using Ubuntu and have the necessary drivers and libraries.
|
| I would love to switch to OpenSUSE TW (which I think is better
| than Fedora despite both being RPM based). I just hate the way
| apt works (think about all the dependencies that remain on the
| system when uninstalling a program).
| jbm wrote:
| How dare you! /sarcasm
|
| I remember finding an unmaintained Gentoo box in a corporate
| environment at a client's server room. It hadn't been updated
| for an indeterminate period of time and was running normally.
| However, it was a security risk so I decided to try to update
| it.
|
| On Ubuntu? This would be relatively simple (this was circa
| 2008~2009 or so, with the box being 2 or 3 years old). On
| Gentoo? Impossible. Everything I tried ended up with random
| errors, and googling them led to more and more complexity. I
| just wanted to update stuff related to security, and nothing
| worked.
|
| I eventually gave up and moved the app to CentOS (IIRC) and got
| rid of the Gentoo box. I also found RPM more irritating than
| APT, but much better than Gentoo.
|
| I see a lot of pearl clutching about mainstream distros like
| Ubuntu and a lot of unguarded praise of distros like Gentoo,
| Arch or whatever. However, every single time, I remember that
| incident. Gentoo at home? Sure, if it works for you, do it. In
| a work environment? Not unless you pledge to maintain it
| forever.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo's a rolling release, and if it gets too far behind
| you're better off just "reinstalling" over it and re-emerging
| all the programs. The source tarballs and builds continually
| get pruned.
|
| Ubuntu sometimes handles upgrading better as you can find the
| archived DVDs even for very ancient versions, but things will
| break.
|
| CentOS doesn't even bother pretending upgrading is a thing.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I recently gave the Gentoo docker images a go and was
| relatively impressed. However, I quickly ran into an error
| where it told me to do something but that something required
| reading 80 pages of things I didn't have time to read, but I
| read them anyway. After reading all of that, I still didn't
| understand what I was supposed to do.
|
| The docker images are really cool though, I was impressed.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| While I've never let a Gentoo system go for "2 or 3 years",
| it's not supposed to be left running like that. If you do
| your weekly/monthly updates like a normal person, it's
| generally fine.
|
| Could it be made easier? Sure. But why put the effort into
| allowing such an anti-behavior?
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| Writing this from my Gentoo machine. Been using it since 2009 -
| sans a 4 day 'affair' I had with FreeBSD, only to learn nothing
| comes even close to Portage in terms of granular control of
| stuff.
| holistio wrote:
| Back in 2005-2006 (I was 14-15), I've been going through a bunch
| of open source operating systems. I started with Ubuntu, tried
| Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE (this was all before Mandriva, Fedora or
| openSUSE became mainstream), did LFS (Linux From Scratch), and
| eventually ran stuff like NetBSD and OpenBSD on desktop as well.
|
| Playing around with Gentoo is a distinct memory: downloading the
| two CD images too two nights on my connection at the time.
| Compiling everything felt like I knew way more about computing
| than I did. I felt smart, powerful and in some sense, an outlaw.
|
| It had a profound impact on the fact that I still work with
| software, many years later.
|
| Thanks to everyone involved.
| nforgerit wrote:
| Joined 18 years ago. Still compiling my KDE (but should finish
| soon). Then will take care of Firefox. My year of the linux
| desktop will be 2025. Great times ahead!
| nforgerit wrote:
| Just kidding of course. Gentoo people, you taught me so much
| about Linux, Operating Systems in general and made me start
| reading docs in their primary language to get the newest
| information (I'm German). You taught me so much, I'll always
| keep fond memories about Gentoo though I moved on.
| herpderperator wrote:
| I am so glad I installed Gentoo on a headless box 15 years ago to
| use as a server (no GUI.) I learned so much about Linux by
| following the Gentoo handbook and being forced to use SSH and the
| console for everything, and I absolutely believe it (along with
| my highly curious personality) is what shaped me for a successful
| career in tech.
|
| And for what it's worth, I'm still using OpenRC on it and not
| systemd, a completely free choice that users have with a Gentoo
| system.
|
| It's such a breath of fresh air to use Portage and Gentoo
| utilities compared to other stuff. It's designed so well, has
| beautiful colours, and the terminal output is clean of random
| warnings or errors that you constantly see with other distros
| (e.g. when booting or upgrading packages.) All the terminal
| output from Gentoo tools is super meaningful and formatted
| consistently.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I do think I have better familiarity with Linux as a result of
| all those years of using Gentoo.
|
| Nowadays I'm (mostly) happily using Ubuntu. Every once in a
| while on my Ubuntu machines and on various Red Hat-derived
| servers I notice a massive dependency tree getting pulled in
| and pine for a USE flag, but it passes.
| bombcar wrote:
| At the time I first encountered Gentoo (about as many years ago,
| I still remember RedHat pulling in X because I wanted mpg123 to
| play music from the command line) it was the most _customizable_
| package-supported distro available.
|
| From what I understand, there are more now that support that
| level of customizability, such as Arch.
|
| What I really love about Gentoo, and why I still use it, is that
| it just happily upgrades _without forcing things on me_ almost
| all the time. Sometimes I have to eselect news read and make a
| decision about something that 's going out of support, but that's
| very uncommon. It's a rolling release that doesn't suddenly tell
| me I'm using systemd or insist that now I have to use nginx or
| whatever.
|
| And since it's from source, all the compiler toolchain bits are
| already installed.
|
| And I can funroll my loops and fomit my pointers.
|
| Everyone should install Gentoo at least once. It's not hard, the
| documentation is excellent (up there with Arch) and you learn
| things. You may not _want_ to, but you do.
|
| Oh, and that color documentation? That made such a huge
| difference! Everything else was HOWTOs and black and white and
| here was well-written documentation with _colors_ to help you
| understand the fixed and movable parts of the commands; _chef 's
| kiss_.
|
| Ooooo sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-6.1.28 just dropped, time to go!
| I'm coooooooompiling!
|
| Also genkernel is one of the nicest interfaces to rolling your
| own kernel you're ever going to encounter. It's a joy to work
| with.
| rcxdude wrote:
| >From what I understand, there are more now that support that
| level of customizability, such as Arch.
|
| Kind of (having previously used gentoo but now using arch).
| Gentoo has the philosophy of 'here, you can build this package
| exactly how you like, and then configure it'. Arch is more like
| 'here's the package built as close to how the developers
| intended, and here's how to configure it'. You can build stuff
| yourself on arch but it doesn't encourage it, and a lot of
| decisions are made explicitly because they makes maintainers
| lives easier, not provides features to users.
| bombcar wrote:
| The feature I really like about Gentoo is I can entirely
| "turn off X" and never have to worry about any GUI stuff
| being pulled in or compiled on my servers.
| von_lohengramm wrote:
| > Slackware, BTW, is ranked 39th - higher than Gentoo.
|
| Proof that DistroWatch ranking is the most meaningless metric.
| contingencies wrote:
| Unique ISO downloads aggregated from all mirrors might be a
| better metric. If that's possible...
| bombcar wrote:
| Gentoo barely has an ISO download; in fact my most recent
| installations I just used an Ubuntu live CD iirc.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I don't need a latest Gentoo image to bootstrap a new system.
| The stage3 is more important, and that can come from dozens
| of mirrors.
|
| Edit: I download a new image like once a year.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Downloads of most OSS software is so heavily skewed by CI
| pipelines, but I'm not sure what shape that follows. Maybe
| it's an exponential curve where the more popular you are the
| more CI systems you're in so the exponentially more downloads
| you have. Maybe that's useful but I'm not sure.
| poszlem wrote:
| Ah, the nostalgia! I can vividly recall the thrill of setting up
| Gentoo on my trusty Pentium 2 300MHz laptop. Then dist-cc came to
| the rescue, linking my laptop to my father's server in the
| basement. Compiling Phoenix (yes, that's what Firefox used to be
| called) was a lengthy process, spanning roughly 20 hours.
| Nonetheless, the sense of achievement and the memories created
| during those marathon compilation sessions were truly fantastic.
|
| Also - the constant fiddling with CXXFLAGS even though my
| knowledge of C++ was fairly limited.
| optionalsquid wrote:
| Gentoo has a special place in my heart as one of the earliest
| distros I used and one that I ended up using for many years. Days
| were spent compiling packages. I'm still fond of the
| documentation, package system, and init system, among other
| things, though I have switched to distros that require less
| effort.
|
| It was also the distro I used when I first started contributing
| to an OSS project. And it was the reason why that project
| eventually added filters to limit what CXXFLAGS were used, since
| we got tired of having to debug weird bugs caused by crazy
| combinations of GCC flags:
|
| https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
|
| And yes, I also went through a phase of having tens of options in
| CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Good times.
| jvanvleet wrote:
| Gentoo was the "gateway drug" that got me moved over from
| FreeBSD. I loved FreeBSD ports and Portage scratched that itch
| with a Linux kernel. Eventually the need for less excitement and
| a little more predictability caused me to move on. I also miss it
| at times.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I cut my Linux teeth on Gentoo around when Sabayon Linux was
| released. Ubuntu didn't make me feel like enough of a hacker,
| so I had to bash my head against configuring grub through
| xserver until I felt like I got it. I learned a ton, but it
| likely wasn't the best use of my time.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Any good articles on FreeBSD adoption?
| codr7 wrote:
| 19 years of compiling the damn thing, and 1 year of actually
| using it.
| paulddraper wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/456/
| Ruq wrote:
| Not if you have enough threads...
| robotnikman wrote:
| "Install Gentoo"
| shmerl wrote:
| _> Below is a plot of Gentoo's rankings on DistroWatch_
|
| Distrowath is a questionable metric. But it doesn't mean that
| decline isn't correct.
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(page generated 2023-05-18 23:00 UTC)