Gentoo Saw Total Commits Rise By 42% In 2020, Great Progress On Wayland

[mazumoto]

Nice to hear that gentoo (my distribution of choice for quite some years now) is alive and growing. I have had the impression that it's slowly dwindling (packages not as up to date, documentation stale) in the recent years, but those numbers are encouraging.
I'm not even that much into optimizing or customizing anymore (that got me started with gentoo when resources were scarce) - but having a stable rolling release distro and portage as the package manager keeping everything syched up is most important to me nowadays.
The only real downside for me is the java support which seems very neglected (still on java 8 by default).

[tuxd3v]

IMHO gentoo is simple the best,[...]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC5E8ie2pdM

[some_canuck]

Gentoo Saw Total Commits Rise By 42% In 2020

and 90% of those were acct-group packages

[kloczek]

Since when quantity means quality?🤔

[xen0n]

Ofcourse I dont use any software they provide bins for. firefox gives me problems in recent years and qemu doesn't have a bin package. Updating gentoo was always painfull. I never had to worry what to update until gentoo locked up all my cores for hours in order to gain 3% performance improvements that I never felt. Gentoo overall is great, not every codebase takes hours to compile. base kernel + utilities compiling from source was neat.

You could use schedtool when you run emerge, to drop scheduling policy to SCHED_IDLEPRIO. That way the whole process tree doing the heavy compilation work behaves as if they're the idle process as a whole, so normal activities are not affected at all (apart from I/O, if you're on SSD then you should be fine).

(Of course the other mandatory option is to fire up emerge just before going to sleep... but there's the possibility that you wake up and realize the command failed just 20 minutes into compilation and you have to wait another day. )

[f0rmat]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC5E8ie2pdM

Haha...Tina looks better than Gentoo - at least I would rather watch her than watch a terminal screen giving updates on compilation.

[AdrianBc]

I actually spent part of my weekend backing up my computer and using GParted to make space on my laptop hard drive in order to add Gentoo to my dual boot computer in order to take a third chance at Gentoo (my first two were miserable failures - but that was on me not Gentoo). I have to wait a little while longer as this is a computer I do some work at home stuff on and I have to leave Tuesday to work for a couple of weeks with a customer.

I am looking forward to giving Gentoo another shot.

I have started using Gentoo many years ago, and I am still using it on all my desktops and laptops, after almost 18 years.

When I have first learned how to install Gentoo, it took some time, but following carefully the excellent Gentoo installation manual guided me to the desired end.


When I have looked recently at the Gentoo manuals, it seemed that they are no longer kept up-to-date as well as in the past, so now a successful installation might be more difficult for a newbie than before.


Nonetheless the Gentoo documentation is still among the best and learning how to handle Gentoo is a useful skill, not only for using Gentoo but also to get a better knowledge about Linux, which can help you for deep customization of Linux systems, even when you use other Linux distributions.

[AdrianBc]

What really turned me off from gentoo is the inability of choosing binaries for firefox, chrome or qemu for example. I'm sure there is a workaround like downloading another packet manager or chrooting a distro but it feels silly to have the best source compiling packet manager and not having any options for binary packages.

You are partially wrong, the firefox-bin package has existed since forever, so you can have instantly a web browser, that you can use while waiting for chromium to be compiled, if you prefer chromium.

I agree that having a binary package for a Web browser is important, because Chromium is the package with the longest compilation time of all packages, while Firefox is also among the packages with very long compilation times.

That is why firefox-bin is very useful on a fresh installation.


On the other hand with qemu I have never noticed compilation times so long to be annoying, so I do not think that having a binary package is important.


The installation of Gentoo takes a lot of time only when for some reason you want to do a completely fresh installation.

Usually when I want to install Gentoo on a new computer, I just copy all the files from another computer with Gentoo, after booting the new computer with an USB memory.

Unlike with Windows, just copying all files works OK and you have the new computer running all that you want in a few minutes at most.

[Adarion]

Hehe, Michael wrote about Gentoo. Maybe one day he will overcome things and even have a benchmark from a Gentoo system.

But anyway: Good to read that my meta-distribution of choice is seeing love and attention. I know there is an occasional dark corner with a few packages that drag behind, and sometimes it's just upstream's fault that they don't release or release incompatible changes that force you to rebuild depending packages. I moved away from imagemagick for that matter, from others - sadly - I can't. Or they have insane dependencies (was ist polkit -> spidermonkey?).
This is all work you do that you hardly ever witness when you use a prebuilt distribution like Deb and related, SuSE, RH and derivatives,... so be glad your distributor does that work for you.
But then, if you really want things to be all about choice: The Gentoo way is the way to go!

[f0rmat]

I have started using Gentoo many years ago, and I am still using it on all my desktops and laptops, after almost 18 years.

When I have first learned how to install Gentoo, it took some time, but following carefully the excellent Gentoo installation manual guided me to the desired end.


When I have looked recently at the Gentoo manuals, it seemed that they are no longer kept up-to-date as well as in the past, so now a successful installation might be more difficult for a newbie than before.


Nonetheless the Gentoo documentation is still among the best and learning how to handle Gentoo is a useful skill, not only for using Gentoo but also to get a better knowledge about Linux, which can help you for deep customization of Linux systems, even when you use other Linux distributions.

My problem was never getting the base operating system to install. Time consuming, but not too difficult. It was trying to get a DE installed. There is where I usually borked it up - and that is where the Gentoo documentation is just a little lacking. Sakaki wrote that great guide on secure EFI boot with Windows 10 and Gentoo with a Gnome DE, but unfortunately he is no longer with them or, if he is, he is no longer able to maintain the tools that he created for it because of his new job. I would use it except that for my use case Gnome is not my desktop of choice. KDE is better for my workflow and there is where some of the documentation is a little lacking - but I will go back through and see what I can do.

If anybody is curious, the link is here: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:Sa..._Install_Guide