196
I like gentoo :D (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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based on https://gitweb.gentoo.org/proj/blender

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[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

Me too!

I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I'm happy I did.

Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My "primary box" is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I'm sleeping. Can't have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can't compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I'm awake in a given day. (And I'd prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.

[-] Cyber@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

Interested in why you went back to Gentoo after Arch.

I use Arch (btw) and tried Gentoo back in the day, but it's always in the back of my mind that compiling source could be "better"...?

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

gentoo is less about compiling from source (I mean it can be about that too) and more about having a lot of choice and really nice tooling. it's in some ways a bunch more stable and declarative than arch. packaging your own stuff is even easier and you can just have most packages be stable while only running unstable version of the packages you explicitly care about :)

[-] TootSweet@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

So, I've been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some "desktop systems" as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It's wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and ~~offer~~ beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

So, I've been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi's to something that doesn't depend so much on some "project" out there to be able to continue to use.

The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn't, it'd be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi -- it's an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

Aside from that, there's SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn't really feel "ready for prime time". It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

Plus, I do kindof like the idea of "more control over my system(s)". Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it's much less "in the spirit of" Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don't need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

Anyway, those are my main reasons.

[-] Cyber@feddit.uk 2 points 1 month ago

Ah, Ok, yeah Arch on ARM is struggling at the moment

I have / had some Ras Pis on it, but they wrapped up .. Pi0? a while back, so had to look at Raspbian (or whatever it's called now)... I'd not considered Gentoo for them... hmmm

Maybe I'll check that out

Thanks

[-] nyan@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 weeks ago

Running a couple of Pis with Gentoo myself right now. It works as well as anything, although unless you're very patient you'll want to set up a binary package host (or distcc or something) to take the load off the Pi's somewhat anemic processor.

[-] banazir@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 month ago

Gentoo is great. I used it for a few years 20 years ago and I still think the package manager is the best I've ever used. I wouldn't use Gentoo today, but I'm really glad I went through the install and maintenance process. It didn't make me a guru, but I did learn a thing or two about Linux.

[-] lnxtx@feddit.nl 7 points 1 month ago

Yummy

[-] tuckerm@feddit.online 7 points 1 month ago

I have a soft spot for Gentoo, even though I haven't used it in years. It was one of my first experiences with Linux, since it was installed in one of the computer labs in college. I just remember that the windows had this physics jiggle effect when you dragged them around. I was so surprised that Linux had a more "fun" aesthetic than Mac or Windows did.

[-] AndrewZabar@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The “fun” aspect was what drew me to BeOS when it was near its heyday. What that thing would do in comparison to Winbloze at the time and the user experience in general was astonishingly more pleasant.

I remember their simple web server called Diner I had a website hosted on an older machine running Diner in my lab and it was just always on and when my office got DSL I felt like a king having that site up and accessible from anywhere, knowing it was on a box in my office and running Diner on BeOS.

[-] 0x0@lemmy.zip 7 points 1 month ago

USE flags are addictive.

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 month ago

they are :)

[-] dethmetaljeff@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

I used Gentoo for ages.... it was the only distro I'd consider for my personal projects. Eventually, the amount of time it took to compile packages wore me out and I switched to fedora. Maybe I'm just old but watching gcc fly by for hours on end to compile X11 was neat but is not how I want to spend my Saturday anymore. Maybe I'll build out a VM for old times sake....

[-] omnimanballs69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

you know now you can install binaries right ???

[-] dethmetaljeff@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

defeats the purpose? Also, like I mentioned, I used it ages ago....binary packages when I was using it weren't very common. I see they "went binary" a few years back... but then, why bother with Gentoo?

[-] porl@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

I'm in the same boat as you. Loved it for what it was on my old Pentium 2 (no internet). Learner a lot and had a blast. Not a daily driver now I have time constraints and binary packages lose what made it special. Happy on Arch for personal stuff and Debian for mission critical stuff.

[-] omnimanballs69@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

because you get more install scripts for packages already in unofficial overlay and its easy to tweak with

[-] Reygle@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Neat

[-] ter_maxima@jlai.lu 4 points 1 month ago

It sounds like a cool distro but I don't see any advantages compared to NixOS, aside from maybe the option to make it more minimal for constrained environments.

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 month ago

it's a lot less scuffed in some ways while still giving you a lot of control and a lot of tools for declarative system management. it's also waaay better documented. it's comfy.

[-] kittenroar@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago

Completely different -- nixos is about repeatability, while Gentoo is about build optimization, customization, and performance.

[-] racketlauncher831@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

Why does every one need to compare every distro to NixOS? We get it. It's neat. It's immutable. It's indestructible. But they are fundamentally different stuffs.

[-] ter_maxima@jlai.lu 2 points 3 weeks ago

You can set it up to compile all your software yourself with the exact options you want, just like Gentoo. Not how most people use it, but still, NixOS can fulfill some of the same roles as Gentoo, they are very comparable.

[-] Someplaceunknown@leminal.space 4 points 1 month ago

This looks like a lolly of some kind, I want to eat it

[-] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

It looks like a guitar pick to me. 🙃

[-] Broken@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

Damn, it looked like candy to me too until I read your comment. Now all I see is candy guitar pick.

[-] NotProLemmy@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

Y

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

it's fun

[-] NotProLemmy@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Don't you have to build everything from source in gentoo?

[-] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 month ago

Nowadays it also has binary packages.

[-] grinka@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 month ago

What the point of using Gentoo with Binary packages?

[-] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

That's for you to decide.

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

you still get huge amounts of choice and really good tooling

[-] zagaberoo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago

Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.

You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.

When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 month ago

That would make a huge difference.

I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don't remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I've never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.

Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there's really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that's actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.

Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.

[-] 0x0@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

but having binaries

For big packages like browsers and office suites, not all packages.
Still a win if you're so inclined. I prefer to compile 100%.

[-] zagaberoo@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago
[-] 0x0@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 month ago

🤯
Well... kinda takes the edge off... i'll stick to compiling.

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

tbh, with modern CPUs it can be a lot easier. especially if you're a bit picky about your packages and get a binary package for your browser.

[-] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago

I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Packaging rust is terrible, compiling rust is terrible. How can it be this awful? Why is the rust compiler so terrible?

[-] Sivecano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 month ago

I've become a rust hater because of this

[-] maxwells_daemon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day

Laughs in Windows...

[-] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 1 month ago

The most popular Linux distros are binary based. Gentoo upgrades build all new software from source. If you don't want long install times, don't usr one of these compile-everything-from-source distros.

There's no option to install Windows from source, and it doesn't really come with anything more than the OS, anyway, so it's apples yto oranges. Windows might not even be compilable on consumer hardware.

[-] deathmetal27@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I tried to make this logo from scratch in Blender for a wallpaper and kinda couldn't get the shape right because the angle of the actual logo is a bit weird.

https://www.pling.com/p/1788876

Good to know that I can use this official model.

[-] just_another_person@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

Mkay

[-] kittenroar@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago

I tried it for a bit -- it is similar to freebsd in terms of the package install process.

this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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