Just showing off my desktop. For those curious, I use the XFCE desktop, and ULauncher tied to the windows key. I’m also experimenting with animated wallpapers using hidimari.
Just showing off my desktop. For those curious, I use the XFCE desktop, and ULauncher tied to the windows key. I’m also experimenting with animated wallpapers using hidimari.
To be honest, I think it is probably about as hard as installing Arch, maybe even easier. The wiki is really great, and the installation guide is also superb. Plus, it is much more stable than Arch while also being a rolling release distro. The only issue is compilation times on weaker HW. Even on my PC (Ryzen 5800X) some packages take about an hour (Firefox, Rust, …). Although these packages usually have binary version that you don’t have to compile yourself.
I see, that might still be a problem then due to the severe lack of decent hardware in my household (who would ever need more than for gigabytes of RAM right), rarely having more than a few hours of uninterrupted time, and I suppose an unreliable Internet connection. Then again, when the time comes I still hope to give it a shot.
You know, I installed Gentoo just fine on a machine with 1GB of RAM. As long as you’re willing to let large upgrades (e.g. LLVM, GCC) run overnight, it shouldn’t be an issue.
I ran out of patience on Firefox and Rust, though, and installed them both as binaries. These are the only packages where I do that.
But in any case, you will need the option of letting your computer compile uninterrupted for more than just several hours. Worst I had was 37 hours, but that was on a hardware that really wasn’t meant to run Gentoo. Best one compiled in under 12 hours, including the graphical environment, but I don’t assume your laptop is that powerful (that one also wasn’t my machine). In general, I would say 1 day should be enough to install Gentoo on a reasonable hardware. And then a second day to set up the graphical environment (X11 and whatever DE or WM you prefer). I would definitely set aside a weekend for the Gentoo install because even if compile times are fast, you will need time to figure out what to do, and possibly to fix mistakes, especially if this is your first install…
Thanks! I’ll definitely keep this in mind!
firefox has a binary right? and so do other larger packages?
Yes, some do, but not all. Packages like OpenOffice, rust, Firefox, chromium and probably a few I am forgetting do. But there are still some like webkit-gtk, GCC, LLVM that you will probably need and take a long time to compile (about an hour on my machine).
do you like using gentoo as a daily driver? what do you like about it that other distros don’t offer?
I used to use Arch but found myself often compiling libraries myself, things like add support for some codec to FFmpeg, OpenCV, … For this, Gentoo is basically your only choice. After that I really come to like the package manager (portage) it is really great, doesn’t break anything and often really helpful. If you for example use some suckless software of anything else you want to add patch to it does support it. You can also really nicely mix and match stable and unstable software (even built from git sources) which at least as far as I know no other distro lets you, or at least not in this capacity. And the community is in my experience really nice and helpful. Probably the main downside is that if you compare it to Debian or Arch, there are not as many packages available. There are still loads, and you will most like find everything you need, but Arch and Debian has more options. Although if you find you want to write your own package for something it is pretty easy to do so, much easier than in Arch/Debian IMO.
Plus, at least for me tinkering and playing with different compile options, flags, kernel configuration is always fun.
I just don’t know if I have the time to maintain a gentoo system lol. I’ve always been interested in it, but I feel like the advantages of it aren’t enough for me to change.
Portage is definitely cool. I think it is inspired by the ports system on FreeBSD, which also lets you choose different compile options, use a stable or newer version of software, etc
Although it is a bit more involved than let’s say Debian/Fedora it is pretty stable, I don’t think I ever had any update that broke something. Especially if you are using stable packages and not unstable. If you update at least once a month, you will probably be fine. But yeah, overall it is a bit of a tinkerer’s distro, especially if you try to do things like compile your own kernel etc.
It’s something that’s interested me before but I don’t think I’m the target audience. I always thought of gentoo as being a meta distribution, or something for embedded system or specific hardware, where gentoo’s strengths really come into play
I wouldn’t really say that. I would consider it more of an enthusiast distribution. Although it is true that it supports more architectures than most, still it’s main users are just people on normal x86 machines.