What are the arguments against Gentoo? Having never personally used it, this distro seems like the ultimate OS.
One thing I've seen mentioned is people getting tired of having to compile everything themselves. However, with AMD likely releasing a 12 core consumer processor for
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no installer. however the Gentoo Hamdbook is awesome. install it on a spare machine.
compiling everything takes time.
and you don't have to compile things you don't want to but at that point use arch
Bumping for interest
It's difficult to install/use and yea, the compiling. Other than that, an amazing fast debloated distro with a good community.
Maybe people hate that the package system is written in python instead of a language that's much faster?
I don't know.
Gentoo is an old Jow Forums meme. It has a very old history dating back to the creation of this board. Gentoo was indeed a great distro years ago (a lot) but at the moment? It's just too impractical for a daily use and it should be considered only if you are an hobbyist with a spare hard disk (NEVER install it on a main hard disk, partitions or not, or you will be fucked by it sooner or later just like on Arch with pacman) and experience.
Quick rundown about Gentoo:
>be a great distro during the paleozoic periods
>freetards flooded the board recommending people to install it unironically
>insane installation process (not even handbook back then) caused brainlets to completely fuck up computers
>as the years go by gentoo became more and more obsolete as freshier and easier to use distros like Ubuntu stole its spotlight
>contrarian nostalgiafags couldn't accept Linux becoming more mainstream and accessible so they started shitposting about Gentoo
>"install gentoo" meme is created
Present day:
>winlets are bored of using windows since they were sucking on their mom's tits
>Gentoo shitposters more alive than ever
>"i wanna be cool and hip like those gentoo users"
>no backups, zero prior experience with Linux, handbook existence gives them false confidence (it's well-made but intricated as hell)
>infinite fuel for memes and screencaps
Besides, Gento doesn't offer any concrete advantage compared to the most accessible distros like Ubuntu or Mint. I've had Gentoo for a few years on a secondary SSD, perfectly installed and tailor-like configured everything manually to fit my machine's specs but the compile times not only aren't faster but even slower compared to other, more mainstream distros. The flag settings are outdated, predesignated and aren't worth it when compared to all the cons that come with it. It's a cool distro to have on a spare hard disk to get your hands dirty with source code and learn more about how an operative system works but that's it.
Infinite flexibility and minimality are myths
Gentoo isn’t infinitely flexible, no matter how many USE flags there are. Here are two examples where you can’t get just some part of the required functionality.
The first is MySQL. You can’t just get the mysql client, or C libraries, which means you have to download and build the entire server if anything on your system needs MySQL support. For example, suppose you’re setting up a web server, which will run Perl web apps that talk to other servers running MySQL. You can’t just build Perl with MySQL support. You build dev-perl/DBD-mysql, and it depends on dev-db/mysql. Look at the ebuild:
DEPEND="dev-lang/perl
dev-perl/DBI
dev-db/mysql"
If you want anything to do with MySQL, you just installed a MySQL server, even if you wanted your web servers to be “minimal.” Other distributions let you get just the client programs or C libraries.
The next example is Samba. It’s much the same—you can’t just get Samba client libraries and programs, you install a Samba server too.
Even USE flags don’t give you full flexibility. For example, mytop will use ANSI color codes and hi-res time if there’s support for them, but it doesn’t really need them. However, they are listed as dependencies in Portage, so even though they’re optional for mytop, they’re not optional in Gentoo. In theory you could add USE flags for that, but in practice, you don’t get the choice. In theory, Gentoo is infinitely flexible, but in practice it’s not. This should not be a surprise.
I’m sure there are other examples, but I don’t want to get into it too much. I don’t mean to put down the developers’ hard work, but in these cases this just doesn’t do what I want. I want a system that can talk to MySQL or Samba servers, without being one itself, and without having to compile all that extra code.
I use Gentoo on my main machines. No issues.
Upgrading can be an enormous pain:
First you sync,
Then you run emerge -avuD --newuse world and look at what’s going to be upgraded,
Then you cancel and tweak some USE flags,
Then you pull your hair out as you still can’t understand what package is trying to install 301MB of dependencies you don’t want,
Then you use equery and friends to try to find out,
Then you pull your hair out because these tools say there is no such package, or can’t find the files for it, or find the package but say nothing at all,
Finally you get on the forums and figure it out, and get the flags/whatever right. It turns out there’s a new default USE flag for some package that doesn’t show up in the upgrade list, and it wants to install a bunch of “dependencies” it doesn’t need. For example, there are lots of things that want to install multiple versions of QT, including QT itself. If you let it install version 3 for just one program, it will want to simultaneously upgrade itself to 4 and keep the version 3, because that program needs it,
Then you let it upgrade, which still has to download 194MB (hey! you saved 105MB, be happy!) over your DSL connection and takes 4 hours to compile on a fast 64-bit machine loaded with RAM—why? Why, because of course GCC has to be upgraded from 4.1.1-pre5_r16a to 4.1.1-pre5_r16b, which is probably three lines of source that changed. But as I say later, you don’t dare not upgrade GCC.
Now your system is upgraded, right? Wrong, everything is broken because it isn’t linked against the new glibc/QT/whatever. Time to revdep-rebuild—oh goody, it wants to rebuild your entire system. Another 7 hours of compiling. Cozy up to the back of your computer’s case, it’s cold in the basement and that thing is warm. Who needs a fireplace? Aaahhhhh. Watch a movie.
You won’t have to do this again for another three days, don’t worry.
I’m exaggerating for effect. It isn’t like this every three days. There is something to upgrade every three days, or even every day, but it’s usually small and incremental. However, if you let it slip, it becomes a nightmare, and even when you keep up with it, occasionally you still get this kind of mess. I am absolutely not exaggerating about the size of these. Recent memory contains painful un-repressed experiences with xorg and GCC, which took weeks to solve on certain machines (how much pain you experience totally varies from system to system, depending on what you’ve installed and how it’s configured). And even when this doesn’t happen, it is a royal pain to do this every few days.
ignore these bait pastas
Even in the best case, it’s too slow
Downloading and building everything from source may promise “infinite flexibility” (more on this later), but it’s too slow. It doesn’t seem that way at first, but after a while, it gets tedious. Compiling everything is just a waste of time, for most people and most purposes. Why should everyone have to start from source code with every package? If we all compiled all our own software, we’d waste billions of hours of processor time every year. There’s something to be said for doing things once and then enjoying the benefits, and compilation is a good example, in my opinion.
Downloading the source is also usually a larger download than getting pre-compiled packages. It’s a waste of bandwidth.
I run gentoo, and have nursed this installation 16 years now. I was interested in it as a "rolling release" distro, as the first distros I tried (mandrake, back in the 2001/2002 days) would have trouble getting updated versions of software beyond simple patches. I'd try to install newer RPMs from the newer versions of the distro, and would run into issues with the dependency resolution of rpm. So I went with gentoo next as it had a reputation at being really good at deep dependency resolution.
It's worked well enough that I'm still running the same install 16 years later, even if I did have to recompile everything for 64 bit.
One thing I will say against gentoo, is that I frequently end up having to diagnose merge conflicts and the like, and it's become a bit of a chore.
Also, a lot of the build scripts don't parallelise all that well (see paper titled "recursive make considered harmful" for an investigation of why), so a 12 core may not help you as much as you'd think.
Anyway. It serves my needs for a desktop machine, though I don't think I'd use it for a server image.
Gentoo is not optimized for my hardware!
As I said above, the whole “Gentoo is optimized” train of thought doesn’t ring true for me. Here are some experiences I’ve had where the Gentoo “optimized” build ran very badly on my machine:
Firefox. When I used an official binary package, Firefox ran like a dream. But if I did this, I couldn’t link against it for building the desktop environment, so then that desktop environment wanted to build the Mozilla suite. So one way or another, I ended up either compiling Firefox from source, or Mozilla from source. And Firefox from source ran like a dog. Even scrolling in a text field was slow. I know, I know—I read all the forum entries about locales and blah blah, and it helped, but it still ran badly. One note about desktop environments—I like to use Fluxbox or XFCE, but there are certain things that have at least some dependency on gnome-base. I don’t mind having that installed, except that it in turn depends on things… and that makes for a lot more things to upgrade.
Any DVD playing software.
OpenOffice.org
MySQL server (I think—preliminary results discussed below).
These are the places where I most notice the speed difference. It beats me why packages I compile from source are slower. I bet I’ve spent a hundred hours trying to learn enough to fix these and other speed problems, but I never could.
The only thing I think might have been more responsive on Gentoo, before I switched to a binary distribution on one machine, is GTK+. On this machine now I notice a small lag in bringing up dialog boxes and so forth. (QT has always been lightning quick for me, no matter what).
The OpenBSD pasta faggot found a new target
One of the problems with the idea of custom compiled versions being faster, at least in my experience, is that you need link-time optimisation to get the best performing binaries. In my testing -flto is by far the most effective single optimisation option, simply because it allows the other optimisations to be more effective as they're no longer confined to working within one translation unit.
The problem with this, though, is that -flto takes a shitload of RAM. I think someone tested it and found it took 70Gb to do an -flto build of clang/llvm.
Gentoo probably isn't as fast as binary distros, then, if only because the binary distros can have their builds done on large buildservers with 100Gb+ ram.
As someone who's used Gentoo for a couple years, the biggest problem with it is that having your own unique configuration of software features, versions and compile flags means that you'll run into problems that have only ever been encountered by other Gentoo users. For example, I ran into an issue where pyblake would segfault because I used the -ftree-vectorize system, which caused emerge to segfault (there's a gentoo bug report out there if you want details).
Other than that, the only thing that irritates me is the compile time for chromium. It's around 3 hours on my system. 3 fucking hours. and on top of this, chromium updates all the time. Thankfully, you can exclude certain builds from a system upgrade through portage.
most of the arguments are buried under NSA shills trying to demonize gentoo
>The problem with this, though, is that -flto takes a shitload of RAM. I think someone tested it and found it took 70Gb to do an -flto build of clang/llvm.
Whether is is pasta, bait or both, this is FUD. It compiled fine on my 4GB ram machine.
>Then you run emerge -avuD --newuse world and look at what’s going to be upgraded
-N is the short version of --newuse.
also, you can you -p if you just want to check what's going to be upgraded
>Then you cancel and tweak some USE flags
I very rarely have to do this, and usually portage tells me which ones are needed.
>Then you pull your hair out as you still can’t understand what package is trying to install 301MB of dependencies you don’t want
>Then you use equery and friends to try to find out
>Then you pull your hair out because these tools say there is no such package, or can’t find the files for it, or find the package but say nothing at all
Is there a specific piece of software that you've had do this?
Hmm. I heard this in a Cppcon lecture. Possible it's been fixed since then.
>you need link-time optimisation to get the best performing binaries
In software I've worked on at my job, I've rarely found that LTO had a huge impact on performance. It was usually in the area of 5%. In addition to this, LTO can expose issues with strict aliasing (thankfully GCC actually has warnings for some occurrences of this) and other forms of UB, so it has a similar risk to using -O3.
comparing arch to gentoo is one of the most brainless things you can do
Is there a video of it? Link?
LTO by itself doesn't have much of an impact on performance on desktop machines, but it does noticeably benefit embedded devices, since it often reduces code size.
youtube.com
I don't know about you, but 5% was more than I got from any other optimisation (relative to -O2 baseline, that is).
>LTO by itself doesn't have much of an impact on performance on desktop machines, but it does noticeably benefit embedded devices, since it often reduces code size.
I would expect embeded software to use more static libraries as well, because they don't need to worry about upgrading libraries, so they would benefit more from LTO than desktop software.
Thanks for the link, saved for later.
>5% was more than I got from any other optimisation (relative to -O2 baseline, that is).
-O0 (the default) is hideously slow on GCC because it builds exactly what was written. I believe the mindset of -O2 is that all the optimizations are guaranteed to improve performance. -O3 are optimizations which can increase the code size, so they can reduce performance in some cases. As a result, a lot of software seems to be built with only -O2. This is why the Gentoo wiki warns you to avoid using -O3 system-wide.
Don't install an Linux called "Gentoo." Man this sh*t is so wrong in so many motherfu*king levels yo...I was talking to one of my nerd friends and he sent me 3 CDs with the name only labeled "Gentoo" I said to this dude, What's this sh*t? He just giggled and said "Just install them and MAKE SURE NOBODY IS AROUND YOU WHEN INSTALLING IT!" Then I thought it was some weird virus or some strange sh*t but as I installed the first CD, I was like "Yo.....what the fu*k.." THEN IT CONTINUED and I was like "Yoooooooooooooooooooooooo......." THEN THEY GOT IN THE MOTHERfu*kING SHELL AND THEN I SAID "YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" I couldn't fu*king believe what I just saw, It was like Satan gave me his Linux collection, sh*t was so disturbing..YET I COULDN'T STOP INSTALLING IT, THEN CD TWO AND IT WAS TWO OF THEM.....THOSE COREUTILS...YOOOOOOO.......THOSE COREUTILS....AND THAT PROCESS DIED THEN IT...YYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO... THEN THAT COREUTIL EDITED THAT CONF FILE THEN YYYYYYYYYYYYYOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO........IT WAS LIKE YOUR bi*ch WANTED TO USE COMPUTERS WITH YOU BUT SHE WANTED TO SOMETHING "DIFFERENT" AND IT WAS SO absolutely glorious, YOU JUST...KEPT INSTALLING IT...AND THAT'S WHAT I fu*kING DID!!!!! THEN I INSTALLED CD THREE...THREE COREUTILS...THRRREEEEE!!!!!! IT...WAS...THHHHHHRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!! AND GREP WAS HIS NAME NIGGA, GREP WAS HIS MOTHERfu*kING NAME!!!!!! OH MY GOD,I AIN'T GOING TO HEAVEN NIGGAS, I ALREADY SOLD MY SOUL TO Richard Stallman!
So I Just want to tell you all right now..DON'T INSTALL A LINUX NAMED GENTOO, DON'T DO IT NIGGA, IT'S LIKE Plan9. REMEMBER WHAT I'M SAYING TO YOU NIGGAS!
Saved.
exactly this.
used it out of curiosity after arch broke the second time. switched back to arch after just to find myself really comfy with void.