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darkwolf140219 3d ago

lizzy مثلية الله ☭

heart_lesbian_diagonal2

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

@lizzy yea generally from what i've observed that's the case

there's a few grifter knobs that use gentoo, but those typically don't get involved at all in the community

@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.

lizzy مثلية الله ☭

heart_lesbian_diagonal2

@ticho i would say it is still more time consuming than most other distros, yea

lizzy مثلية الله ☭

heart_lesbian_diagonal2

@ticho however, thanks to the binhost, there is less of a time burden when it comes to compiling

@lizzy I remember I loved their etc-update utility to merge the config file changes. Am missing it to this day on Debian, as well as on corporate distros at work.

@ticho @[email protected] i think that tool has been replaced by dispatch-conf? which just calls diff (or whatever your diff tool is set to.)

@ticho @[email protected] either that or im dumb and you were just saying what dispatch-conf does and not that it was literally etc-update before

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lizzy Yes, they were phasing etc-update out even back when I was still there, but for some reason I liked it more than dispatch-conf.

They were (at least at the time) functionally pretty similar, I think - they'd iterate over unprocessed config files, letting you keep old or new version, or merge them interactively, hunk by hunk. Or launch $EDITOR to do whatever you want.

@ticho @[email protected] another tool i find that i miss in all distros is eselect, especially eselect's java plugins, because it is really nice to just be able to switch everything with one command. Fortunately, nowadays most programs let you set the specific jdk/jre so it's not as big of a deal as it was.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lizzy That interactive merge was the thing I miss. Often you'd only tweak a line or two in a given config file, and this allowed you to comfortably go through any proposed changes in the config file, which often were just typo fixes in comments, or newly added options. Diffing and going hunk by hunk laid it all out very clearly.

@ticho @[email protected] yeah it's way better than when a distro just does a system update and is like "all your config files are located where they were but with .old at the end good luck" (best case) or worst case they just up and fucking delete your config (Where the fuck is my /etc/pipewire/pipewire-pulse.conf fedora?)

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lizzy Yeah. Although RedHat, Suse and Debian at least install most of the new configs as .rpmnew, so your old, working configs are still used, but you still have to inspect them yourself, without anything helping you.

And vast majority of server owners at my work either are not aware of this, or ignore it out of laziness. We've had unnecessary outages thanks to that! But I digress.

@[email protected] @ticho id also say that gentoo has come a long way. i used gentoo a while ago and it doesn't feel the same with modern gentoo. Git sync is native (tho you do have to enable it for gentoo repo) and a majority of the conflicts i used to have really don't exist. the replacement of genkernel with installkernel that can call hooks for initramfs generation via multiple providers (depending on use flag) and the fact that now it's as simple as ever to keep custom kernel configs (savedconfig) is really really nice.

literally the only complaint i can think of right now is that portage has a new flag governing the minimum amount of free space in /var/tmp/portage (defaults to 18GB) before it spawns more jobs... i feel like it should have been a default of 8 or 4 especially bc the tmpfs page on the wiki shows that 16gb is more rhan enough. (i have always used around that much and for the rare conflict with packages that take massive amounts of space for artifacts i have /var/tmp/notmpfs/portage setup using env).

this problem is easily solved by putting the new flag with your own value in EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS (in /etc/portage/make.conf)

@ticho @[email protected] another mild complaint was something i didn't even notice until after it was fixed - seems like the gnome desktop profile defaulted to pulseaudio instead of pipewire. i literally only know this because when i read the news they stated that they're moving over to pipewire because it was a weird discrepency between profiles

@ticho @[email protected] I think part of this is that they finally set the default backtrack to 20. I remember having to constantly do backtrack flags in my emerge invocation. I have not had to do a backtrack 30 in quite some time (20 is a very very reasonable default)

WithQuietEyes 2d ago

I have an old laptop and (slightly) more kernel expertise since the last time I did a big install, and I've been eyeing Gentoo and wondering if I'm brave enough - this is very reassuring to see 😁😁

@[email protected] @ticho @[email protected] do it. as long as you have an okay enough computer. as lizzy said earlier in the thread binhosts do exist, and there's also -bin packages available in ::gentoo for firefox, chromium, libreoffice and plenty of other larger projects that might give someone grief. i have not regretted switching my desktop from fedora to gentoo.

@puppygirlhornypost2 @lizzy @withquieteyes Don't worry about it too much. If I managed to run Gentoo for years on an old Pentium Pro with 96MB RAM, you can do it on anything. :)

And that was long before binhost was a thing.

Amorpheus 3d ago

@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.

@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. :)

Amorpheus 3d ago

@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... 🙂

@Amorpheus @lizzy I mean, most of that are quite generic package management features which any self-respecting distro has, but yeah. :)

@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.

@lizzy I always wondered how they did respond to Exherbo/Paludis and if the hatchet is buried as of now. Exherbo is closer to my needs but I can't forget my time spent with Gentoo and I still have colateral benefits from their wiki, bug tracker, and stance on supported platforms... I can't just brush them over and it would be of bad faith from me to ignore the whole social aspect of it.

@lizzy I still have my old x86_64 Gentoo stage DVD too! One day I'll get a spare computer and see what I can do from there for funsies

spinnyspinlock 3d ago

@lizzy fantastic news, I installed it recently but I avoid linux communities because of *gestures vaguely*

@lizzy I switched back to Gentoo after Fedora started pushing for LLM nonsense. It's been 5 years since I left, but it's good to be back.

1. Not having to deal with muh licensing, hardware decoding/encoding in ffmpeg just works without having to re-compile half of your system (well, technically you compile your entire system but you get the idea)
2. Much easier/cleaner to roll your own kernel (config, patches) and create "packages" (rpmspec is such a disaster)
3. Not having to deal with packages that were abandoned years ago (libimobiledevice on Fedora hasn't been updated in years so it no longer works, ioquake3 version in Fedora repos is from 2011), list goes on...

I should document getting chromebook audio to work on the wiki (which is probably the best resource for learning how Linux works outside of LFS, it's incredibly well written and easy to understand, basically state of the art in my opinion). In other words: Gentoo folks are absolutely based

@elly @lizzy
re 2., /etc/portage/patches is the greatest invention in the history of linux packaging
on servers and hands-off machines i use nixos nowadays, but gentoo remains undefeated in the field of Enabling Weird Fuckery.
making every program on your system print meow on malloc is one text file away, you can just do things

Furbland's Very Cool Mastodon™3d ago

@lizzy I would totally get involved if I had the time and/or spoons to actually go about compiling the thang ding. er, dang thing

OrthoMatrix 3d ago

@[email protected] that has been my experience too and it makes me wish I had just gotten into it earlier