Gentoo on laptop for daily software development?

nirse · n00b Joined: 23 Feb 2017 Posts: 4

Hi there,

I was a Gentoo user for a good while (4 years?) about 10 years ago, and I had great fun with it and learned incredibly much from it. Then I moved to OSX for work reasons, but I'm moving back to linux - and very happy with that!

Now I'm considering what distro to run on my new laptop. Gentoo is one of the options (with Arch as main contestant), but I have a single concern: back in 2004, it was not uncommon for my system to be down for a day or so after running a bigger update, with configs needing updates, compiler options needing tweeking etc. I guess you all know the drill to some extent. That wasn't so much of an issue back then, and to a degree that was what I actually liked about gentoo. And the community was always great, I think every problem I ever ran into (with respec to gentoo updates, that is) had alread been picked up in the forums. So that's why I'd really like to give Gentoo another go.

But now I'm in a different situation, I'm no longer a student and the box I'll be running is my main developement machine, which for me means a day of the machine not working is a day not having any income. Also I currently have more pressing issues to attend to than compile flags (mainly small kids that need to go to their Judo classes etc.), which will prevent me from spending a weekend day running updates. So I just need a reliable, stable system on which I can do my development.

So my question really is: what is your experience with this, how is Gentoo doing these days in terms of stability between updates? Would you recommend Gentoo, or not? How much time do you spend on keeping your system up and running?

Thanks,
niels

fedeliallalinea · Posted: Thu Feb 23, 2017 11:27 am Post subject:

I use gentoo at work and at home without any particular problem.
At work gentoo is used for develop in java, android, web and database.
The system is in stable branch (amd64) with some programs in testing.
Probably stability or the problems that one might encounter depend also from which programs you use.

All this as long as you do updates regularly, anyway in gentoo needs to be done a little bit more maintenance compared to a binary distribution.
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ct85711 · Veteran Joined: 27 Sep 2005 Posts: 1791

In some parts, with the faster CPU's now days, the compile time isn't as bad, with a few exceptions where the packages are now taking more time to compile over their older versions.

The one thing I do want to point out on using a laptop, so that it can be on your mind is going to be the heat buildup. A lot of laptops do not have the best for heat dissipation/transfer, so this can cause your laptop to die sooner. I heavily recommend you get a cooling pad relatively soon if you are going to be compiling a lot. The cooling pads are not great, but they will help some.

cboldt · Veteran Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 1046

I run mostly stable x86, with a 64-bit kernel. I update once a week. The updates take between 10 minutes to a few hours, never a day. The long updates are due to new kernel (which you can set to "skip it" if you want, I "skip it" on a long-uptime machine) or building firefox/thunderbird. I've been in this routine for more than five years, and have yet to lose the computer for any time at all, due to updates. I have lost some functions from time to time, with the most urgent sort being loss of email. Fixes in those instances (maybe one each year to 18 months) have taken a few hours, mostly due to my ignorance.

Not to say I don;t spend hours "playing" with the system, but very little of the time is "forced" by updates. Recent "forced" activity was conky change in config file style, saned new version is buggy on my scanner (so I just masked it).

The updates are on three machines, each slightly different. I use a laptop as a sort of headless server (it's the long uptime machine) for email, printer, jabber; a desktop machine as file server; and a laptop machine that is my interface with the three machines, 99% of the time. They all take the updates in stride. Pretty low hassle.

ian.au · Guru Joined: 07 Apr 2011 Posts: 592 Location: Australia

The Doctor · Moderator Joined: 27 Jul 2010 Posts: 2678

I don't want to badmouth Arch, but between Gentoo and Arch on my laptop Gentoo maintained a much higher availability and Arch got dumped a few years back. I literally had Arch dump an unsalvageable update on me and wreck the system. Gentoo has never done that to me.

I also find Gentoo to be perfectly usable while updating 99% of the time. It takes about 2-5 minutes of user time to update weekly baring some minor portage complaint. Those can usually be solved in another 3-20 minutes depending on severity. The actual compile time is rarely a factor on a modern box, for me at least. The box is usable and updates are generally very smooth.
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C5ace · Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:19 am Post subject:

nirse:

I use a stable Gentoo Xfce laptop to code in "C" and test small cli applications within Codeblocks IDE.

The average keyboard time spent to update Gentoo is less than a minute each day.

nirse · n00b Joined: 23 Feb 2017 Posts: 4

Thanks for the feedback, everyone,

you have given me a lot of confidence in going for Gentoo. Now I just have to wait for my laptop to arrive...

stephan-t · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 May 2014 Posts: 122

What notebook or processor can handle weakly updates in minutes?
My relative old desktop CPU not minutes rather than hours.
Firefox, Qt packages, gcc etc.

cboldt · Veteran Joined: 24 Aug 2005 Posts: 1046

I'm using a couple of Thinkpads, a T420 and an X201, each has an Intel i5. Agreed that gcc, firefox, and a few other packages can take an hour, but those aren't updated weekly by any stretch. I just finished weekly updates here on three machines, took about 20 minutes, and less than one minute of keyboard time (and that was to fix an error I'd introduced).

Atmmac · Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2017 6:01 pm Post subject:

I have Gentoo on my work laptop and am running ~. I havent been down for more than 10 minutes over the past 3 years. I would absolutely recommend gentoo for your dev laptop. Its also nice having the pentoo overlay for my pentests.

stephan-t · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 May 2014 Posts: 122

Atmmac · Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 1:57 pm Post subject:

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Fri Mar 17, 2017 2:43 pm Post subject:

well.

previous box t9500 penryn notebook cpu. worst package libreoffice => 13hours?

when you run ~amd64 you will need to compile libreoffice.

now ivybridge 3610qm, thats a very slow cpu these days. worst package libreoffice 70 minutes.

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Gentoo has improved. Portage tells you to rebuild packages. But it won't be a showstopper as years ago. Years ago when you broke a "link", many packages will refuse to start. This hardly happens these days as gentoo keeps those "shared libaries". please look up the proper term for this.

When you want a stable box, I personally recommend to stay away from fancy pants like SYSTEMD, gnome and kde.
openrc / eudev + i3wm does a proper job. less hassle.

I'm also back to more a 1990 cli approach and not Windows 95 gui approach. Less guis, less issues.

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cons for choosing gentoo:
complicate setup
outdated packages: I find on a weekly basis several packages which are not up to date. e.g. homepage claims to have been updated, or news announcement on a technical website announce a new version and such.
bugs on bugs.gentoo.org are not very well handled in a timely fashion. well ubuntu does the same, ubuntu just turns any bug invalid when the bug reporter does not responds after 60 days...

pro

can be configured how you like it
most packages in the tree work as they should.

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