How good is Gentoo for those with limited internet access?

StevenC21 · n00b Joined: 07 Jun 2018 Posts: 63

What I mean is, my internet is very, very slow and outdated - I get 50 KB/s at best. How good is Gentoo when it comes to things like this? I currently run Arch and I am feeling the pain of constant software updates locking down my package manager. Is Gentoo good in this regard? Not just in terms of package management, but just general 'required' internet usage to manage it.

DawgG · l33t Joined: 17 Sep 2003 Posts: 866

as much as i like (love) gentoo, i strongly advise against in your use-case. you have to keep portage up-to-date with rsync and everything is downloaded from the internet as sources; for compiling some packages you sometimes need much more than when downloading precompiled binary packages.
you might be able to use it when you download the stuff you need someplace else with faster internet (eg work), but i think this would be a real hassle.
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Proinsias · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:28 pm Post subject:

I found it painful with limited internet. After a few weeks on a slow and interrupting connection I just installed Calculate Linux until I had a better connection.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:43 pm Post subject:

StevenC21,

50k will be painful but if you have remote internet access, you can do all the fetching there.
Its called Sneakernet.
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NeddySeagoon

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

StevenC21 · n00b Joined: 07 Jun 2018 Posts: 63

Well, these messages are rather disappointing. Regardless, I appreciate each one. Thank you for your time.

Rad · Posted: Thu Nov 29, 2018 7:33 pm Post subject:

Slow/unstable internet works, but it'll be a bit annoying.

For syncing Portage with less bandwidth usage, app-portage/emerge-delta-webrsync or using git may help a little, and there is also the still functioning but not properly updated app-portage/getdelta for the actual packages (which IIRC Arch also has a pendant to). Sabayon (binary Gentoo derivative) also does delta updates. That said, I haven't used Gentoo's or Arch's delta updates much since >10 years ago, and you'll certainly have a more limited amount of possible mirrors since the mirrors need to cooperate with the delta update files.

OTOH while I say that using Gentoo will be annoying, I don't necessarily think you'll have a very much more pleasant time with anything else. I guess Alpine or some distro like that has fairly small packages, but last time I checked that it wasn't easy to run a desktop on it. And Gentoo is ultimately one of the distros that allows you to use a lot of smaller packages without depending on too many larger ones.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

50KB/s as in 400Kbit/s? It'll be slow but not impossible, my first Gentoo install was over a 512kbit DSL line.