Is gentoo really as big a hassle to maintain as people make it out to be...

is gentoo really as big a hassle to maintain as people make it out to be. right now im running arch but i want to experiment with gentoo or funtoo as a main os. are there scripts or settings i can use to make my life easier while using gentoo

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youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc
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Install Gentoo

i would like to. but am i going to ripping my fucking dick off after 4 days

youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc

just give a shot
the biggest difference between arch and gentoo is the package manager
pacman is the simplest in the world, and portage is the most complex, but also the most flexible
giving you the most control of how to install packages, with what features, and often choose what libs to build them against
maintenance part is easy, the learning curve is the hardest part
totally worth it

It's easy to maintain, just annoying.

I've never had any problems maintaining Gentoo for 2 years, the documentation is clear and easy to follow, Portage is well designed and intuitive, it all fits together nice and simple in a way that I kind of miss now that I'm on KDE neon (which is basically clusterfuck Ubuntu at its heart).

But does it get annoying. Want to install a small package quickly to test something out? Well, too bad, because GCC/Webkit/whatever is compiling for the next 3 hours. After a while you also start to realize that there's no apparent benefits to compiling everything from source. "Muh performance" is placebo. "Muh saved space because I can cut bloat with USE flags" is an even bigger placebo, storage is cheap and having to read through a list of USE flags for EVERY package that you install no matter how small, only so that you can save up that extra kilobyte by removing IPv6 support is moronic. And you won't dare simply not look up the USE flags and install that small package you need as is, because the default USE flags leave out essential functionally that the package maintainers for some reason have decided are opt-in rather than opt-out. I'm also convinced (but I cba to prove) that Firefox actually runs slower when compiled on Gentoo compared to the official binary builds. Plus videos/webm playback are mysteriously glitched for quite some time now as well (bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1325935).

It quickly becomes annoying and unwieldy. It's a fun distro but if your time is valuable you might want to pick something else.

I'd say that gentoo is quite EASY to manage, if you have some Linus savage.

The thing is, it just takes a while to set up initially.
Installing/Upgrading packages can take a while though if you have a slow CPU.

I love it though!

If you come from Arch you'll probably miss the AUR but you have overlays instead.
Which are, not as great, but nearly every package I've wanted is available in some overlay.

I mean LinuX savage ofc. Haha.

I also like the news system in Gentoo where you get notices in the package manager if there are thinks to consider during the update to prevent breakage.
In arch you have to check their website for such things.

I don't think pacman is easier than portage. just different.
Some operations are much more complex.
like removing unneeded dependencies.
Maybe not something you do very often as "pacman -Rs" removes them automatically but still.

Pacman: pacman -Qdtq | pacman -Rs -
Portage: emerge --depclean

I'm tired.
SAVVY, not savage :P

It's fun. For about a week or two.
You relaize the benefits it gives are so marginal, you can disregard them.

And be assured that you come across a point where you can't upgrade the system. You'll realize you have to mask/unmask specific pakages for that simple task.
At that point you'll never look at the distro the same way as before.

>removing unneeded dependencies
that's just one part of what the package manager does
with portage, via USE flags you get to select what features you want and don't want, and when available choose what libs to build packages against (like ssl or libressl)
pacman will install a binary blob you have no power over to configure

>makepkg
JFYI

Yea, that's great!

You can also more easily upgrade or downgrade packages as there are multiple versions of each package available.
In arch you are "stuck" with the most current stable version. (I think you can up-/downgrade in arch but it's not as seamless. Correct me if I'm wrong :)

The iso dosent even come with the base install.How nonsensical is this.Gentoo is shit

I read over the Gentoo install guide and t.b.h. it looks the same as Arch except with compile scripts.

You're going to get compile errors that you'll have to troubleshoot. Plus the compilation process itself takes fucking forever.

Portage will often dictate which flags you may use or may not use.

do get the minimal install iso

It's literally more automatized than the average mainstream distro.

I think you mean automationified.

I think you mean autotransformatogrifationified.

depends on your setup, profile, make.conf
ultimately you're in charge from the get go

iirc arch doesn't natively allow downgrades, you need 3rd party tools
pacman is a oneway pkg manager
I'm not hating on pacman, I think its the best binary pkg manager out there, simpler to use than dpkg and apt, and the sheer amount of pkgs arch carries, even without aur and blackarch repos, is very impressive
but portage is still so much more, its a system all on its own, can even fetch binary pkgs if that's what you want

speaking of which gentoo allows the installation of pacman and dpkg, and I never tried but does any user have experience with those in gentoo?

Compiling everything is fucking autism.

Your meme is fucking tiring.

...

you do not have to compile everthing

Gentoo is fine, until you try using the musl overlay

Shit becomes a total clusterfuck and installing libs with close to dead mirrors becomes a nightmare.

How long does it actually take to compile most things?

I mean, I know there are going to be some which take a long time (was it hours or days?), but what about your average, non-outlier programs?

I'd like to think that modern compilers and hardware would have a lot of tricks to speed up tasks by now.

in my experience 99% of things take 1-10 minutes to compile. A few things take more than that. Chromium/webkit/qtwebengine take hours for an example. Nothing takes days unless you're compiling on raspberry pi or something.

no it's actually really easy

your web browser should take about 20 minutes at least
www-client/firefox-bin exists though

Because chrome/qtwebengine do not support parallel build
Firefox takes 12 minutes to build

gentoo is pretty easy to do stuff with, but the wait time for compiles especially for word processors (not vim or emacs) or web browsers is fucking unbelievably long.

Gentoo also requires you to learn a ton of super gay stuff about your hardware for the compilation to actually be worthwhile. Also in most cases the "performance" benefits you will receive will be completely incomprehensible unless you have goku reflexes.

You're a pussy if you're quitting after 4 days, it took me a month to get it perfectly configured

wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Quick_Installation_Checklist fuck kde and all that other shit, that can wait until you can actually take the disc out

I'll switch to gentoo if someone tells me how to install a binary kernel package during the initial installation process instead of compiling it from source.

I didn't get any errors when I followed the guide. How did I fuck up?

Literally nobody who's ever installed gentoo ever had any compile errors or the need to troubleshoot anything.

wget it or use debian-sources from funtoo.

>is gentoo really as big a hassle to maintain as people make it out to be. right now im running arch but i want to experiment with gentoo or funtoo as a main os. are there scripts or settings i can use to make my life easier while using gentoo
It's very easy to use and maintain, the most annoying about that is you have to wait for compile/recompile packages when installed new packages or add a new use flag.

>wget it or use debian-sources from funtoo.
It's faster to compile a custom kernel than a debian-source kernel.

debian-sources is precompiled

>I'll switch to gentoo if someone tells me how to install a binary kernel package during the initial installation process instead of compiling it from source.
If you look at the handbook, there's another option to install using genkernel, you didn't need to do anything special.

compiling is annoying, especially on old hardware.

otherwise it's exactly the same as any other bare bones linux. So.. what's the fucking point. (there is no point)

>debian-sources is precompiled
I didn't know about that, the last time I try funtoo, I have to masked debian-source or it will ask for 10G free space to compile, only the pre installed version are precompiled.

The point is that it's the only distro that's actually stable while still allowing you to have bleeding-edge packages (without requiring you to upgrade half the system to bleeding-edge), which themselves barely if ever break simply because you compile against what you have natively and not against assumptions made upstream.

On top of that, it's trivial to patch a program, e.g. against 0-days, as it's literally just a matter of dropping a patch in a directory and reinstalling the program: the patch will be applied automatically.

Not to mention the insane utility of use flags. Compare with ubuntu where you have 30 versions of vim for various featuresets and none of them have the features I actually need for all my plugins.

yep. sums it up perfectly.

no.

>old hardware.
Distcc?

yes.
eix
gentoolkit

I installed a Gentoo image on an Orange Pi PC and did not have to compile anything.