• Sentry64@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    2·
    40 minutes 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
      2·
      30 minutes 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.

    • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
      27·
      13 hours 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

    • boonhet@sopuli.xyz
      1·
      28 minutes 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.

    • notthebees@reddthat.com
      6·
      13 hours ago

      Funnily enough, the one irl Linux user I’ve met used Gentoo. I originally assumed they used arch.

      • poinck@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 hours 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.

      • IngeniousRocks (They/She) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
        4·
        12 hours ago

        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

  • lauha@lemmy.world
    2·
    16 hours 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

    • 1984@lemmy.today
      4·
      15 hours ago

      But I went to use OpenOffice, not watch it do its thing in the background…

      • lauha@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 hours 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.