lizzy مثلية الله ☭  Mar 17
i like gentoo
not just the os but the community
it's mostly older guys but it couldn't be further from the techbro circlejerk these spaces usually turn into
the philosophy of the os is every configuration is encouraged and supported no matter how much it deviates from defaults or from the mainstream
this translates into how humans are treated
gentoo people actually genuinely care, about ethics, about diversity, about people's niche use cases, many of them use older hardware and make sure it stays supported, there's a class aspect to that too you know
Show threadtichoMar 17
@lizzy How is Gentoo these days? I used to run it on a few PCs maybe 15 years ago, even was a "developer" and maintained a few small packages for a while, but as I had less and less free time, I gradually moved to Debian.
Show threadAmorpheus

@ticho @lizzy I've been using Gentoo for over two decades now. Setup can be tidious at first, but once you get the hang of it and have a config collection, you can write your own install script for an one hour install.

People often saw a drawback in time-consuming compilation, but with binary packaging you can opt out from that.

What I like most about it is that you have full control over kernel configuration. Above that I really value the hardened profiles when it comes to security.

Mar 17 at 11:16amWeb
Show threadtichoMar 17

@Amorpheus @lizzy For me, the main draw was always the customizability on build level - I could for example completely disable samba and ldap integration of anything that I install, and the support for those things would simply not be compiled in, thus none of the requisite libraries or utilities need to be installed at all.

USE flags were a godsend. :)

Show threadAmorpheusMar 17

@ticho @lizzy Yeah, really useful when you try to aim for minimal system size or having an aversion to qt.

There are tons of great feats.

- Overlays (clean integration into the package manager for custom patching for example)

- License selectors when you do not want proprietary stuff pulled in on your system by accident.

- Slotting for having different versions of a package pulled in, which allows max backward compability.

- Integration of third party repositories.

And so on... 🙂

Show threadtichoMar 17
@Amorpheus @lizzy I mean, most of that are quite generic package management features which any self-respecting distro has, but yeah. :)
Show threadmathewMar 17
@ticho @Amorpheus @lizzy I used to run it on a VIA C3 system because you could compile everything to make use of the C3’s unique extra instructions. I also liked to compile the appropriate hardware drivers straight into the kernel and not have to bother with initrd and a multi stage boot process.