• herrvogel@lemmy.world
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    15 hours ago

    Couple days ago my Arch (btw) tried to update gcc by building from source. I started the update, went and made myself dinner, ate it, cleaned up the dishes, and it was still building when I returned to my PC. How do people live with Gentoo I will never understand.

  • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    Heh. I wish my work were closer to hardware level, so that playing with compilation actually made some sense. If there is a kind soul here, please do tell me: does Gentoo look like it will still be around in some 10-15 years? I would hate to be too late to hop on the bus

  • MidsizedSedan@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I remember having a Gentoo install, seeing the wiki for how to install steam, and just dual booted with Bazzite.

    I’ll try again another time

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Yeah obsidian is 5-5.5 on the moh’s scale. It’s softer than quartz. What makes it special is how sharp it can get, not how hard it is. Also, it’s just really cool

      • nesc@lemmy.cafe
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        3 days ago

        They actually don’t but it is the way programs are installed on gentoo by default.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        2 days ago

        That’s kind of the point of Gentoo. Though it’s not as hard as it sounds, the package manager (emerge) pretty much does it for you. It just might take a while.

        • poinck@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Please don’t be angry with me, but the package manager is called portage; emerge is just one commandline tool to interact with it.

          • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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            2 days ago

            No problem, tried Gentoo like once over 5 years ago. It was cool and fun but not a daily driver for me.

          • mkwt@lemmy.world
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            15 hours ago

            They’ve had individual -bin versions of a few big builds, like firefox, chromium, and libreoffice for basically forever.

            They had something called distcc for a long time too. That let you, the user, cross-compile packages on one machine for installation on different machine(s).

            But at the end of 2023, they dramatically expanded the system, adding configuration machinery to install $packagename from source or binary (i.e. not like firefox and firefox-bin). And they set up the server infrastructure to host a much larger number of official binary packages for amd64 and arm64. Around the same time they added a “distribution kernel” as an ebuild, so users no longer had to “compile it yourself”. And I think the dist-kernel is now available as a binary.

    • Deebster@infosec.pub
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      3 days ago

      Hang on, what? You’re talking about the extra time (and electricity), or do you think it’s in any way difficult/error prone?

    • msage@programming.dev
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      20 hours ago

      Oh hell naw.

      I am a proud and vocal Gentoo user.

      And you won’t make me to back to binary packages. Fuck them.

      USE flags are the best thing ever, reminding us why software should be Open.

      Gentoo 4ever.

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      Former Gentoo user here. The thing I have in common with the other former Gentoo users I know IRL (a whopping 2 of them) is that none of us have the time for it anymore.

      So if I ever find myself having too much free time, you bet your ass I’ll reinstall Gentoo.

      • poinck@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I was a passioned Gentoo user for many years and I also only met 1 other IRL Gentoo user. Ok, there were more once at a Linux conference where a bunch of Gentoo users had a desk showing off Gentoo compiling @system for a BSD system.

        Even the binary repository was not enough for me to not go back to Debian after ~10 years Gentoo usage. It was a fun hobby and a great learning experience.

      • I tried Gentoo once, I just straight up do not have time for that. It’s fine, honestly nice even, but the waiting omg. Maybe I was doing things wrong but I don’t have all day to sit around eating for things to compile

  • Sentry64@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 days ago

    How hard is it to install gentoo anyway, and how would someone install anything on it. I’ve literally never used gentoo and the only distros i’ve used are linux mint, debian, fedora (not my cup of tea), arch (archinstall) and EndeavourOS (current) so i’m curious about the world of gentoo

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      Installing Gentoo itself isn’t really any more difficult than Arch. Though I hear Arch has some easy way to install nowadays. It’s kinda like installing Arch the old fashioned way.

      At the end of the day if you follow the official installation guide, you’ll be fine. If you miss a step, you get to learn valuable troubleshooting skills.

      Installing anything is as easy as sudo emerge firefox, waiting for an hour for some obscure part in the compile process to fail, giing up, and doing sudo emerge firefox-bin. But tbh outside of browsers, most things compile fine unless you have esoteric optimization flags in your compiler config (-ffast-math breaks AV stuff for an example).

      Ah and at some point you’ll go “Hmm this six core CPU isn’t enough, I need to upgrade to 16” because most of your packages will be compiled from scratch. And every update also compiles the same packages again (the ones that need to be updated, not all packages. Unless you specify that).

      So why do it? It’s fun, great learning experience and you can customize how your software is compiled (specify your CPU microarchitecture for compiler optimizations, use unsafe optimization flags if you want, use the USE flags to straight up leave functionality you don’t need out of software). Also bragging rights.

  • lauha@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I’ve never had high end machines but I don’t remember installing being a chore on Gentoo even 20 years ago. Just

    emerge openoffice

    And let it do its thing in the background

      • lauha@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yes, but there aren’t that many programs that take long time to compile and those that do you install before hand. It’s not like the size of the compile is hard to predict.