Strategerizing my Gentoo explorations...

[decuser]

I've been thinking. TLDR; help me come up with a workable strategy to move from my fresh install to a polished working environment.

Gentoo is a great learning experience for me. I've only been using it for the last week or so, and I've already learned a bunch of new things. It's slow to have to build software from source, but it gives me time to think about what I've done and that has some value, for sure, so I'm not knocking it. I figure, if I really want the convenience of binaries, I can either turn that on in Gentoo and see what it's like, or more likely, at least until I have a great deal more Gentoo experience, just use MX. Which brings me to the point - I really like Linux Mint and MX Linux. Mint because it just works so much of the time compared to anything else and MX cuz it does too and without ubuntu, systemd or cinnamon. But, I like the minimalism and straightforwardness of Gentoo. I like that it's not systemd (at least that's the illusion, I'm subscribing to) and that it doesn't drag in lots of dependencies by default. What I'd really like though, even more then Mint or MX is a system I build from the ground up that works similarly to Mint and MX.

Hence, the question, what's a good strategy for me to implement that'll move me from noob to running my homegrown Mint/MX?

Not Mint or MX in a canonical (not to be confused with Canonical TM) sense, but in a functional desktop with audio, video, zoom obs studio, shotcut, rhythmbox, printer niftiness, working together awesomeness sense .

So far, I've done several installs on several systems and vms and stuff seems to just work for the base system. I hit the occasional, "why isn't my screen blanking?," type question, but a little digging usually nets me an answer. I have a long way to go yet, but here's what I'm thinking - suggestions welcome!

Figure out how to get things installed - done enough - several different platforms and approaches, all pretty much the same process - get, burn, and boot the install medium, put it onto the system, unpack stage 3, get a kernel, install stuff, yay. The handbook provides the roadmap to follow on this.

Figure out the proper workflow to keep the system updated, as it grows in complexity - no idea yet.
Q1. Is there a best practice here? Everything I read is different, with different frequencies, different incantations, and different workflows, all very confusing.

Grow the system towards the goal - add things in a reasonable order in a way that I can track (in my mind) what's going on - definitely a work in progress. Lots of questions:
Q2. Is there a best practice here? Customizable beyond belief is great, but are there reasonable guidelines or order?
Q3. Are there ways not to do the growth?
Q4. If something goes off the rails with a lot of packages having been added, is there a way to return to the state prior to the installs?

Snapshot progress along the way - no idea how.
Q5. Is there a way to do system snapshots?

A short rant: It appears that Gentoo supports ZFS, but root on zfs isn't really a supported thing. Further, my favorite curmudgeon (Linus) and his minions hate ZFS and don't even see the point. Which is fine, if a bit weird... over on FreeBSD, where I use ZFS all the time, I am able to make changes willy-nilly and I can rollback precisely to where I left off, make perfect backups, copies of backups, etc, without any fuss or hiccups or loss of data. I haven't trusted BTRFS since losing a handful of large disks with important content on them with my various attempts to use it over a number of years (It's been at least 5 years since). So, I'm not really interested in hearing how it works the same or is "better". the simple fact is that I've never lost a bit (to my knowledge) on ZFS in more than a decade of continuous operation including numerous OS upgrades, OS changes (FreeBSD to Linux and back again), disk failures, configuration changes, system changes, etc. In a word, I'm sold on ZFS and the OS has to support it or I'm not interested in the OS . That said, Gentoo appears to support ZFS (I haven't quite gotten that far in to the configruing the system yet, but it seems likely). So, I'm not complaining about Gentoo. But, I am curious what the snapshot options are for the root FS (other than BTRFS).

In a nutshell, I'd like to start down a path of installing Gentoo, customizing it towards an MX-like experience, while keeping up to date, experimenting with packages/groups of packages, that move towards a progressively more complex operating environment with a reasonable expectation of not hosing things along the way and having no other way of fixing things than reinstalling.

I would appreciate any answers to the questions I've posed, alternative strategies, or even just tips to keep me from the road to destruction you might have to offer.

[szatox]

IMO you only need answer to 1 question out of the bunch you asked: easy rollbacks. This is the one thing that will be quite annoying to fix later (No, not impossible. Just annoying).
LVM snapshots do pretty good job, if you have lvm, it doesn't really matter what FS you use. Good, old, boring ext is good because it's good, old and boring.
Put /home on a different partition, so you don't rollback your user data along with the system, and try not to oversize root partition too much. You can always grow it later. Actually, don't oversize /home too much either. There may be some other, application specific data paths too, like /var/lib/mysql for example. There's a good chance you'll know if you have any valuable data outside of /home though.

Regarding the rest... Don't worry about it. Roll up your sleeves and go. The road will present itself to you as you walk it, one step at a time.

[decuser]

[pietinger]

First of all: Everything has advantages and disadvantages. You can use your car to drive to the next store or your bike ... you decide it depending on various factors (distance, transportation of purchases, cost of gasoline, etc.) ... the same with your operating system

[figueroa]

The more time you spend USING MX-Linux or Linux Mint, the less time you will spend polishing your Gentoo installation. Additionally, much of what you learn maintaining MX and/or Mint, won't be transferable to mastering portage. Both are excellent. I have many hours invested maintaining both MX and Mint in the enterprise on the desktop, so I'm aware of their goodness for general desktop use.

If your Gentoo system is usable for your day-to-day computing needs, just use it. Then advance one step at a time, going slowly and deliberately.

Two more things. When installing and updating programs, you don't have to watch the terminal. Minimize the terminal window or let it be covered up with other windows and and keep using your computer to meet your computing needs, while occasionally checking the status of terminal windows. In other words, be productive and/or have fun while doing your enhancing or tweaking.

Finally, establish a plan and schedule for making backups. The backups you didn't make yesterday, will be gone forever on some tomorrow. There are many choices of programs with which to make regular backups. Do this NEXT. Everybody needs a disaster/human error recovery system. If you leave your computer running 24/7, backups can be made while you sleep. There are threads in the forums about backup systems. Consider creating a stage4 tarball. I've posted my stage4 scripts here so not too hard to find. With a proper stage4 tarball, a full system can be restored to a different partition or hard drive or even a replacement computer.

Welcome to Gentoo.
_________________
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

[decuser]

[decuser]

@pietinger, you may not have understood everything I was asking, but your answers are quite informative and helpful. I'll put most of it into practice - weekly updates, lvm snapshots, etc. I appreciate your letting me know what order you installed stuff. I was wondering. What I meant by the confusing bit was - what should I definitely not do .

[decuser]

[pietinger]

[decuser]

got LVM snapshots to work and tested, yay. Ready to move from the N4110 to the Thinkpad... hopefully, I can get a brower (firefox) up pretty quickly. I think I'll go with basic desktop install, add ctwm and firefox, maybe hexchat (or even irssi). I figure an hour or two. Then I can tackle the hard stuff.

[eeckwrk99]