Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
They are referring to the fact that Gentoo compiles everything from source rather than shipping binaries. This creates a lot of duplicated work between every user. But it’s not just for nothing. You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries and they are optimized for your system. It is a trade off.
Do you, though? Do you check e-signatures and do you look at the every row of the code?
Well, you have the opportunity to. The fact that it is compiled on your system already gives you a lot of discretion. You can at least see what code is going into the compiler locally.
This is true. In theory its the best way, but ita crazy to think compiling Firefox can take like multiple hours of full computing power. And I like to update my software a lot.
Lets do a small comparison:
Linux power efficiency tier list
Desktops / WMs
Packaging
Distro type
Behavior
So uhm I guess I should switch to Debian 12, update once a week and go out on a hike or something.
It’s not duplicated work, because it’s optimized for your system and usage. If it was actually duplicated it wouldn’t be any better than Debian plus waiting 20 minutes every time you use apt.
Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.
I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.
These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.
Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.
Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.
Interesting, in my experience apps use either GTK or KDE and often KDE just uses GTK? I dont know how this works on GNOME, I guess it forces GTK somehow anyways.
Not technical enough to understand the rest haha.
Oh, I missed this response, sorry!
The example in question there is freeciv, which supports each of those frontends. Typically you’re going to pick the one that your DE uses, but because I maintain the package I had to go through and test it all when I updated it and converted it to the meson build recently. :)
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/games-strategy/freeciv/freeciv-3.1.0_beta2.ebuild#L106-L140 should give you some indication of the complexity that I had to handle here. Not every app supports every toolkit, and this supports more than most!
Edit:
All that complexity means that if I set, for example,
USE='sdl qt6'the build will produce a client for each of those toolkits. Most users don’t have to worry because at least one will be inherited from their profile!It’s fluff these fays if you’re talking about optimizing for speed… unless you’re using very specific hardware for a specific purpose. But if you want to compile in support for something you want to be able to do that most people wouldn’t need, then yeah it’s a real advantage.
I am not sure anymore. There are two Appimages of Gimp at minimum. All are unofficial, but this one is incredibly fast.
On my regular Laptop the Lava render is TWICE as fast as the other versions of GIMP, Flatpak or even from the arch repos.
I heard this is because it uses Arch libraries instead of being compiled to run on this system. Not sure if this is true, but its crazy how fast it is. Poorly not maintained anymore, but now I wonder how fast a system could be if every app was compiled like that.
That’s interesting. I’ll have to check it out.