CloverOS/Gentoo -- A gentoo derivative from 4chan

[Starrcade]

Hello all,

I came across this gentoo-variant made from and based on 4chan called CloverOS;
It's systemD/Poettering free and when I ran it the first time it's actually an automated install of gentoo using a script or two, followed by a binhost
and some of the most aggressive compiler flags in a make.conf;

https://gitgud.io/cloveros/cloveros

[NeddySeagoon]

Starrcade,

Gentoo itself has has several official installers over the years, so no.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

[jesnow]

I've been trying CloverOS out for the past couple months and wanted to give some of my impressions:
[After a couple months more: the gift that keeps on giving].

1) Is it Gentoo?

Yes it's gentoo. [edit: No it's CloverOS] It's a binhosted gentoo compiled for his particular tastes, with his super-riced compiler flags and use flags. You pretty much have to go with those in order for the binhost to be of much use. He activates about 40 or so super-ricer overlays, just that cost me a funking day to go get standard versions.

2) Is it cool?

Yes it's cool. You do a full emerge -e world in a few minutes on a fast connection as opposed to whatever.

3) Does it work?

Some things just fine others maddening. He has decided for some pretty aggressive choices, and you're pretty much locked into them, like libressl over openssl, like gold linker over ld.bfd. the latter cost me a day because you can't build a kernel with gold right now, and I couldn't figure out how to use the normal linker just for kernel compiles. In fact the make.conf is pretty spare (except for about a hundred optimizations and use flags), I don't know how he sets half this stuff. [edit: I do now.] Other things were just frustrating. Middle click to paste was turned off in the x server, but I couldn't figure out how or why. You'd think someone would notice this. The EFI install was extremely frustrating, but I got it to work.

4) Is it an easy installer for gentoo?

No. [edit: NOOO!!! DO NOT DO THIS] I'd go the standard route. He has made so many hard coded choices for you that are difficult to back out. It was frustrating to put in so much work just to get back to my very vanilla setup. Not there yet in fact. [edit:] Unless you *thoroughly* understand how he has set everything up for maximum performance you will not be able to maintain it. Almost EVERY package has a custom build environment buried in /etc/portage/env. All optimizations are on by default, and turned *off* there in individual cases. This results in a nice fast system, and it's a remarkable level of tinkering and testing that must have produced this, hats off to him. But installing this binhost and then switching to normal gentoo will not go well unless you are among the truly annointed among ricers.

5) What does it mean for gentoo?

What's cool is you can use his scripts to make your own distro. I don't know why a thousand binary distros based on this idea haven't sprouted. What gentoo could do is revive the live boot cd based on a more vanilla gentoo, that would get you to the first emerge -e @world a hell of a lot faster than using a stage 3 tarball.

Cheers,

Jon.