Gentoo Had A Busy 2022 With A Weekly LiveGUI ISO, Gpkg Binary Packages For Portage

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Gentoo Had A Busy 2022 With A Weekly LiveGUI ISO, Gpkg Binary Packages For Portage

The Gentoo project has provided a 2022 recap that highlights all of their interesting milestones achieved over the past year for this traditionally source-based Linux distribution that has long been popular with enthusiasts and power users...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gentoo-2022-Highlights

[Eumaios]

Gentoo has always intrigued me. I understand the initial install is quite time intensive, but what are updates like? Much more time-intensive than sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade or sudo zypper dup? Thanks!

[moltonel]

Gentoo has always intrigued me. I understand the initial install is quite time intensive, but what are updates like? Much more time-intensive than sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade or sudo zypper dup? Thanks!

Just like the initial install, updates need to compile packages and therefore take longer than the equivalent apt. But there's no need to babysit the emerge process, you can carry on with your work during compiles. Manual interventions are a bit more frequent with portage than most apt-based distros, but they are generally easier to figure out. With portage, you are never stuck, and you gain superpowers, like easily mixing stable with latest+your+own+patch packages, and not installing features you don't need.

[ALRBP]

Gentoo has always intrigued me. I understand the initial install is quite time intensive, but what are updates like? Much more time-intensive than sudo apt update, sudo apt upgrade or sudo zypper dup? Thanks!

[Gentoo (testing) on my main computer, Debian on servers, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on personal laptops, Ubuntu LTS on pro laptop]

Not that much more for you. It is usually nothing more than "emerge -vatuND world" (not everyone uses the exact same set of options, this is just mine). However, update issues are significantly more common than with Debian or Ubuntu, though not that much more than Tumbleweed (also rolling). It is also less common if you have a Gentoo stable rather than testing (I had at some time, but you lose a lot of interest of having a rolling, since Gentoo stable is not more up-to-date than non-LTS Ubuntu or Fedora and much less than Tumbleweed).

When I talk about "issues", it is usually just a few more commands to type (solving some "useflag" issues which emerge actually solves for you, you just have to approve). You'll also regularly receive "news" from maintainers, directly on emerge, with a few steps to follow to prepare your system for some change (pulseaudio ⇾ pipewire, consolekit ⇾ elogind…), it is usually very easy if you just read the message.

You may have more serious issues (making your system unusable), especially on testing, with out-of-tree drivers, same for all rolling. Gentoo allows for a very simple solution : by defaults, all your past kernels remain bootables, you just need to select from the booting screen. It also helps a lot with regressions (not uncommon with rollings). Actually, there is one more complexity : the actual kernel update requires manual recompilation (emerge only update sources). Nothing more than a sequence of 3 commands that never cause issues. Also, flatpak-installed software have to be updated separately.

Personally, I am not getting headaches due to update issues. It is very rare that an update makes me think a lot to find a solution. Problems comes from other things : new hardware (like my RX 7900 XT), initial configuration of something, specific software (do NOT try to install Sage with emerge). These problems are not necessarily Gentoo-specific, but "initial configuration" is commonly harder on Gentoo.

Now, what is the main issue with Gentoo updates? They are looooong ! Not for you ; as I said, unlike installing, updating is rather simple, but since all software is complied on install, updates also need to compile. The issue is more pronounced is you are on testing, as much more things will have to be updated. An update done every week is likely to be an overnight job, even with a powerful computer. Can take a whole day if done less frequently, it really depends on which software are to update : Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, QT-Webengine are huge, for some, Gentoo provides binary packages to solve this issue. Large collections are also long to update : KDE-Plasma/Framework/Apps, Texlive (which is also a nightmare outside of Gentoo since the issue is not compilation, which is not required, but downloading a huge number of small packages).

Longer update on Gentoo are the reason why I removed it from my laptops in favor of Tumbleweed, keeping the "always up to date" part while eliminating long compilation processes on less powerful machines. I keep it on my main system because it allows for things not other distro would let you do. Useflags allows you to control compile-time options for software you install, you may even apply your own patches with emerge ! Gentoo is definitely the best for power users, but other distributions are more adapted for most cases. If you want your computer to be just a tool, if you want stability, then I recommend using something else. There are reasons why only one of my computers is on Gentoo. That said, if you have Gentoo working on one computer, you can have it working on many. Back in the time, at university, we had tens of computers on Gentoo; once you have one working configuration, you can expend it.

[klara]

Depends on what packages needs updates. On a modern machine it's usually not that time intensive even if it takes longer than a binary distro. If it's firefox, libreoffice, gcc, llvm, or other packages of similar size it can take a long while.

On my machine with a 3900x firefox takes about 10 minutes, gcc 29 minutes, llvm (excluding clang and others) 10 minutes, libreoffice 24 minutes.
If the machine is less powerful it can take a lot longer, however. I have an older broadwell laptop (2c/4t) that can take several hours or more depending on what's updated (gcc alone takes more than 3 hours). I usually update that less often and over night.

It can also depend on what use-flags are enabled even if most packages are too small for it to matter.

[Eumaios]

My thanks to all the replies! Very helpful!

[grigi]

I find updating a Gentoo system less risky than an ubuntu derivative. The "stable" gentoo packages are very stable. I tend to only run "unstable" for a few things that benefit from it, like mesa. And the ability to install multiple versions of nearly anything is great as a software developer where I might need to quickly switch between different versions of Python/PHP/Node to test/debug something. This is something that was incredibly hard on any other system I used.
KDE/Plasma has many packages to update but the slowest packages to update for me is QTWebkit and LLVM+CLANG. Everything else goes pretty fast.
I do use Flatpak for desktop apps where they work as they tend to be very up-to-date and well managed (and easy to update through discover).

The news you get to tell you about potential breakages BEFORE they happen is great. As usually they gate the breaking change behind some manual process first. So unexpected breaking changes hardly happens anymore.

I keep on coming back to it.

[GunpowderGuy]

So Gentoo Is planning to offer better or More support for binary packages?

[dreamcat4]

when gentoo finally offers binary packages by default (i.e. as easy as flicking a global switch, and being done), and also if it can eventually offer robust and complete aarch64 support, then i will want to come back and compare it to void linux. since that is really my goto option now.

because quite frankly i do love that gentoo pkg system emerge whatever. for when we need to compile those user selected pkgs of interest which. of course we do need to do also in the daily course of things. it's so impressive for that and i wholeheartedly agree. a pleasure to use

just gotta say: void ain't too bad either though! not the same. but different. and not bad either for what it is

[kylew77]

Gentoo is cool. It was the first distro I was able to compile a custom Linux kernel for my hardware in my college years. It was also my gateway drug to FreeBSD and the ports tree.