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.
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.
yeah, it’s definitely for enthusiasts. But it seems like gentoo would be something you would build something on top of, if you know what I mean. I think google does that with chromeOS?