ext4 on all hard disks, but my installs are all several years old at this point, and I might choose differently if I were starting over from scratch. The boot partition on the ancient laptop might actually be ext2; I don’t remember and it’s certainly old enough that that might still have been preferred Gentoo procedure when I first set it up. Removable media might be ext3, ext4, or vfat, depending on compatibility needs and how long ago I formatted it. If I buy an SD card or USB stick that turns out to be preformatted in exFAT, I reformat it before use to ensure everything can read it.

They’re all solidly reliable filesystems (well, except for the vfat), but perhaps not the most featureful.

In the general case, no, but there are some rare specific cases where that does work.

If you’re trying to produce Linux media that will boot on a single-board computer that has an onboard bootloader, like a Pi 4, you can indeed just partition the target medium and copy the files manually (been there, done that, working with a custom Gentoo install with no ISO).

If the bootloader has to be on the target medium (as it would for a desktop or laptop), then that won’t work unless you also do a manual bootloader install after copying everything. Not impossible, but at that point you’re hitting the level of complexity where it’s easier to figure out the correct dd command.

(As for Windows? Don’t even bother. It hates being worked on with anything but its own tools.)

Well, you’re not affected by this specific bug, anyway. Whether you’re virtuous in other aspects of your life is beyond the knowledge of anyone here. 😜

Not all distros need to appeal to the mainstream. Diversity is a good thing in and of itself. In biology, it makes ecologies more robust, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t do the same for a software ecology.

The day when there’s no longer a place in Linux for Slackware, Gentoo, LFS, Alpine, and other independent non-mainstream distros is the day I move to BSD.

Gentoo installation is time-consuming, but Gentoo maintenance usually isn’t. Just allocate portage a couple of cores while you do something else with the rest of the computer. Or leave the update to run overnight, if you’re on a potato.

So of the three happiest distros, two aren’t very concerned with mainstream appeal and will carry on contentedly doing their thing while ignoring rankings like this. Sounds about right.

Exactly what I was thinking. “People who are already less happy tend to gravitate towards Firefox” is as valid a takeaway from those graphs as anything else. (Also, where are all the other browsers? I’d expect Edge and Safari, at least, to be represented, even if Vivaldi and various Firefox forks were not.)

There are some older DE-agnostic virtual keyboards (svkbd, xvkbd, matchbox), but they may not work in Wayland, if that’s what you’re using.

Distro best added to the “Power-user distros to avoid” list: Gentoo (saying that as a Gentoo user).

I disagree with your claim that doing things like installation steps manually is necessarily a bad idea, though. It depends on your goal. Obviously it isn’t the fastest way to get things up and running, and as such it isn’t appropriate for newcomers (or for mass corporate deployments). If your goal is to learn about the lower levels of the system, or to produce something highly customized, then it becomes appropriate. Occasionally, it pays dividends in the form of being able to quickly fix a system that’s been broken by automation that didn’t quite work as expected. Anyway, I’d suggest rewording that bit of your Arch screed.

Too lazy to check github . . . will it work on systems that don’t run Gnome? It would be nice not to have to figure out how to hand-write a GTK4 theme as I did with GTK3.

I think that’s the old locolor icon theme. The version I have around is modified for TDE, but the original should exist somewhere out there (if OpenSUSE is still offering KDE3, then they probably have it).

TDE’s CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There’s also a matching widget style (Motif). I’d guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that’s currently limited to X11.

LXQt, XFCE, Maté, TDE. Any of them will do. Which you choose depends on personal preference and how large an ecosystem you want—LXQt has only a few basic applications, TDE has pretty much everything that was in KDE3, the others are somewhere in between.

Generic distro kernel? You shouldn’t have any problems.

Hand-compiled kernel cooked up with -march=native? You’re sticking with AMD, so there should still be no issues unless some instruction got dropped between the old CPU and the new, which almost never happens. You might have to add a kernel module or two for things built into your mobo, nothing serious.

(Hell, I had a Windows 2000 install on a multi-boot system survive an upgrade like that, once upon a time. Just booted perfectly happily on the new hardware.)

As far as I’m concerned, everything goes under /mnt , and has for the past 18+ years.

“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.

Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.

Gentoo’s benefits come from having software specifically compiled for your specific CPU, which can take advantage of its quirks. Technically that’s achievable with other distros as well; it’s just a lot more work when it isn’t built into your package manager. You can also eke out additional performance by building a custom kernel and removing various features that are meant to protect against bugs or security concerns, and while Gentoo doesn’t push custom kernels as hard as it did twenty years ago, the capability is still readily accessible.

So: Gentoo makes it easier to access methods than can in theory be used to speed up any distro. The gains are either quite modest (for custom compilation) or not necessarily that good a tradeoff (disabling Spectre mitigations and other protections in the kernel). 🤷

(Yes, I wrote a serious response to a joke post. Bite me.)