Planing to come back to Linux. How is Gentoo today comparing

[C1REX]

Hi,

I'm just a casual user. The last time I was using it it was like 10-15 years ago. It was decently popular back then before Ubuntu and Arch Linux became known.

So how is it today? My only but big problem was constant errors with updates. Always some dependencies missing or something. Does updates work or should I be ready to fix problems whenever I want to update world?
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[Zucca]

If you use stable packages and don't tinker too much with USE flags... yes. Updates tend to go quite smoothly.
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..: Zucca :..
Gentoo IRC channels reside on Libera.Chat.
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[Ant P.]

emerge handles updates a lot better than it did in 2004. The biggest improvement is that it won't remove C-library dependencies from the disk until all other programs are upgraded to stop using them, something that used to require a lot of manually stopping to run revdep-rebuild in the past.

[duane]

I've had two or three updates blocked by one package or another over the last year or so. In every case, I let the update do as much as it could initially, then restarted the emerge, by which point the rest of the update went normally.

The last serious issue I had was an update to the x86 version of rust, which had an actual bug several years ago. Even that was easy to get around after reading the bug report.

[Muso]

1. Know your hardware. Building a kernel is easy if you know all of the drivers and features you need.
2. Portage is fantastic and has been vastly improved since 2004.
3. Blocks on upgrades happen on occasion, but the explanations tend to be clear with solutions often being quite simple.
4. Update relatively frequently to avoid having a mess on your hands.
5. It's Gentoo, of course it's brilliant.
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"You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think" ~ Dorothy Parker
2021 is the year of the Linux Desktop!

[C1REX]

[sitquietly]

[C1REX]

[duane]

[sitquietly]

[Goverp]

One warning - you increasingly need a fast modern cpu to run Gentoo - specifically to compile certain big packages, especially web browsers, firefox, chromium, but also libreoffice and qtwebengine (which is basically chromium again). I've finally had to replace my 13-year old 4 processor 1.6 GHz box 'cos "emerge --update" runs were taking over 12 hours... There are pre-compiled binary packages (firefox-bin etc.) for several of the worse offenders, but if you use a lot of them, you might as well run Arch linux and save all the compilation, at the cost of reduced customization.
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Greybeard

[C1REX]

[sitquietly]

[C1REX]

[John R. Graham]

I guess the developers chose not to.

Seriously, "choice" makes binary packages problematic. What choices should the developer make for you? For example, libreoffice has in excess of 25 independently selectable USE flags. That means, not considering CFLAGS, it can be built in over 33 million different ways.

In an attempt to make certain very large packages practical on certain less capable machines, the developers provide a few binaries. I don't see that number increasing significantly in the future.

- John
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I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

[C1REX]

[Ant P.]

[NeddySeagoon]

C1REX,

If you really want somebody else's Gentoo, you can install the binary packages provided on the liveDVD.
The current live DVD is badly out of date. A new install would be easier that updating an installed liveDVD.
I know that there is an updated liveDVD in testing.

The whole point of Gentoo is that its a toolkit you use to define and build your own distro.
Installing binaries on Gentoo is rather like putting yourself into a straightjacket.

-- edit --

There is no single set of "default USE flags".
The defaults are set in your the profile you select. On amd64 I have 31 profiles to choose from.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[redblade7]

[duane]

I don't understand the complaints about compile time. I'm running gentoo, at this moment, on an intel core2 duo (circa 2006), with firefox, thunderbird, wine, openoffice, and the unstable kernel. I update it once or twice a week, and it generally takes less than an hour. It only took me 24 hours to do the initial installation, with no binaries after the stage3 package. And at the time I did the install (a couple of years ago), it only had 2GB of memory. (I've added some since.)

I don't sit there, waiting for the compile to finish anyway. It runs in the background, barely noticeable. Admittedly the older hardware produces more heat and eats more energy, but is that really an issue? Doesn't your TV suck up more power? If you ever play a game on it, you're wasting more energy than updating will use.

I guess it would matter if you absolutely can't run your system more than an hour a day, but it's hard to imagine a situation like that.

[C1REX]

[NeddySeagoon]

C1REX,

If you have the RAM to build in tmpfs by actually moving to it you won't see any performance improvement.
That sound a bit odd to start with but given sufficient RAM, all the build products will remain in the kernels buffers.
You will save lots of disc writes that will never be read. That's a very good thing for SSDs, particularly the newer 4 bits/cell devices that are rated less than 1000 erase cycles.

tmpfs is just like any other filesystem to the kernel except that it has no permanent home on disk.

Your new Ryzen is going to spend a lot more time waiting than the Duron did.
Dependency tree calculation is either NP-Hard or NP-complete. That means its only ever going to be single threaded.
On the Duron, it used the whole CPU. On the Ryzen, it will be half of one core.

As a usenet sig used to say, "All Computers Wait at the Same Speed" :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[pjp]

[makalega]

https://blogs.gentoo.org/mgorny/2019/12/19/a-distribution-kernel-for-gentoo/

[halcon]