anyone else reinstall just for fun?

[apophysis]

got through my first install with the generic kernel and kde. it took a few days and a bit of extra research, but the awesome documentation helped every step of the way. Now I wiped it out just to try a completely different configuration and have more customization I know I want to configure the kernel this time around. maybe set up xfce, openbox, or configure my own desktop manager with i3 / dmenu etc. any unique Desktop Environment recommendations?

[figueroa]

Welcome to Gentoo. I put up a thread at: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-1119739-highlight-openbox.html about my transition from LXDE to just OpenBox. OpenBox is well supported with lots of information on the web.
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Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[psycho]

Hi Apophysis.

Yeah, despite Gentoo's ability to stay healthy and up-to-date without reinstalling, I enjoy fresh installs from time to time, too. You're always learning so every new install gives you a few opportunities to do things better than last time. In fact Gentoo is so flexible that you can often implement (without reinstalling) the kinds of changes you'd have to reinstall another distro to make, simply by editing configs and rebuilding...but it's still fun, if you can spare the time, to start over. If you're careful to script, backup and generally document what you do each time, re-installations are much quicker than initial ones, too.

Re GUI desktops, I still prefer boring old XFCE, though I'm occasionally tempted by lighter desktops and often wish I'd invested the time in building a great FVWM setup or something like that. To be honest the main reason I stick with XFCE is a single panel plugin (xfce4-genmon-plugin) that I use so much (to display the outputs of scripts as arbitrary icons/text on the panel and to respond to clicks/mouseover events etc.) that other desktops feel restrictive: I guess there are alternatives out there but I haven't found anything else that makes it so easy to put whatever information and controls I want on my panel. Of course you don't need a panel at all (you can use conky or whatever for output and just use keyboard shortcuts for the stuff you want to do), but it's such a standard part of a GUI desktop these days (not only most Linux distros, but Windows and MacOS all have panels of some kind, usually with vaguely similar info and even vaguely similar icons) that it feels comfortably familiar...like the rest of XFCE, after all these years of using it.

The great thing about Gentoo is that even heavyweight desktops like GNOME and KDE, and middleweights like XFCE, can be much lighter than on other distros: you're only building what you actually want, so the whole experience can be leaner and tidier. That being the case, it's probably worth having a play with all of them, if you're shopping around for a new GUI, before investing lots of time into configuring the one you choose. That's because you might have concluded from other distros that a particular DE is too bloated, and yet Gentoo's version can be quite sleek by comparison. Anyway, it's fun: if you reinstall the whole OS just for fun, you might as well take a good range of GUIs for a spin, as some of them are very quick and easy to install and remove.

[apophysis]

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m excited to try openbox, and it looks easy to switch between different desktops to experiment with. I finally have my system booting now. Last time I let genkernel do the work, but this time with the custom kernel I spent longer than I’d like to admit over getting my LVM root volume to mount with busybox in initramfs. Turns out I needed support for nvme loaded in the init script and now it’s working great!

I’ll start experimenting with openbox tomorrow. For now I’m happy with booting to runlevel 3 with a greeting from fortune

[figueroa]

Congratulations on the big successful step. Happy Gentooing.
_________________
Andy Figueroa
hp pavilion hpe h8-1260t/2AB5; spinning rust x3
i7-2600 @ 3.40GHz; 16 gb; Radeon HD 7570
amd64/23.0/split-usr/desktop (stable), OpenRC, -systemd -pulseaudio -uefi

[CooSee]

me too

because i realized that most packages are not needed at all.

always looking out for smallest system possible.

now i came across, after all this years, to i3 and or sway for the first time

greetings (...programs)
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" Die Realität ist eine Illusion, die durch Mangel an ehrlicher Kommunikation entsteht "
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" Der Mensch ist von Natur aus neugierig, was am Ende übrig bleibt ist die Gier "

[spica]

If you reinstall from scratch very often then this can be interesting Binary_package_guide

[apophysis]

[cboldt]

This script was posted some time ago [not mine!], as a way to make a copy of files in the /etc branch, that are different from default install.

[psycho]

The qcheck tool (in portage-utils) might be useful for reverting an already-installed system to a pristine state, depending on how much you've messed with things. For backups, if you make sure your partition scheme maintains a tidy separation between systems (software) stuff and data (user) stuff, you can simply do partition snapshots, either with your filesystem's built-in tools, or with a tool like fsarchiver if you're using ext4. So for example, as soon as the system's kernel is built and it's booting itself to a working console, you can archive that as a clean, minimal, easy-to-modify foundation from which to start again.

Storage is cheap these days, and your system partitions shouldn't be huge when there's no user data on them (and portage is best kept elsewhere too, if you're doing this kind of thing), so it's possible to keep lots of copies of various stages of your build...you can do backups like pristine_gentoo.fsa, clean_x11.fsa, fresh_kde.fsa or whatever, so that you have a range of points that you can start at rather than a full start-from-scratch, if for example you're sick of your GUI stuff and want to redo that from scratch, but are perfectly happy with the underlying system. As long as your user data has its own up-to-date backups, you can mess with the software underneath it to your heart's content.

The hidden files and directories (.config and .local and so on) under user home directories have the potential to be a bit of a headache, as some of that stuff sits in a grey area between software and data (in the sense that users who've put lots of time into configuring things how they want them are going to want some of the stuff in there backed up with their data...and yet if you backup and restore their entire home directories, hidden files and all, you're potentially backing up and restoring software configuration issues rather than producing clean default systems). However, their being hidden is a helpful, useful distinction that prevents this issue from being a major hassle. Basically you can backup everything under home, hidden files and all...and then you can restore just the visible user data folders (so you have a genuinely clean install, right down to the user configuration stuff)...but you've got everything there in the hidden folders backed up just in case, and can restore it selectively (e.g. ~/.config/heavily_configured_program) if it turns out that configuring it again from scratch is going to be a nuisance.

Yes, having pre-built packages on a local binary host is great if you prefer reinstalling to winding things back on a running system...it makes bringing restored backups up-to-date with current systems much, much faster.