Until a few years back most of my systems used Linux From Scratch. It's amazing for learning your system and how all its libraries integrate. I created my own boot scripts, my own pacman package manager repository, etc. One of the main reasons I stopped using LFS was the amount of work required for updates.
Firefox is bad to compile yourself, because it's slow and often requires a library version you don't have, such as a new ICU version. Updating ICU also requires you to build packages that depend on it: harfbuzz, ffmpeg, qt5, poppler and the list goes on.
Chromium takes it to a whole new level. While Linux packages typically have an automake flow (configure, make, make install) Chromium requires ninja, not just ninja but a specific version depending on the Chromium version. Then you need a ton of libraries with specific versions (or custom patches) or use the built-in versions provided by chromium, which may or may not compile at all. Then there is clang, while most software is compiler agnostic, Chromium does not compile with gcc. Of course, it needs a specific clang release, sometimes even a pre-release, or again a load of patches to compile. It seems the chromium build process is mostly built by engineers desperate to reinvent the wheel. While everything can work fine with sane Linux defaults (GCC, automake, system libraries) they convinced themselves their software is so complex and unique it requires a special treatment.
I tried Gentoo some 20 years ago or so for fun at home. I guess my naive thinking was that software specifically compiled for my hardware would run noticeably faster and "better".
But I didn't last for very long. I remember starting the install for a bigger app before going to bed, only to find the thing still building when I woke up. And as for the dream of more tailored builds, I never really noticed anything much different - I probably was too uneducated about build configurations, or - more likely - the differences just didn't matter too much.
Eventually, I switched to Ubuntu and never looked back.
So, I'm curious - is anyone using Gentoo as their daily driver, and what is the main incentive for you?
I'm using it as my main OS. I have it installed on 4 machines: a RK3288 SBC, a RK3588 desktop, a x86-64 desktop and a x86-64 laptop. Main incentive for me is customization.
- It makes it very very easy to patch any package before they're installed - just put the patches in /etc/portage/patches/<pkg name>/, and that includes the kernel too.
- I can exclude package features that I don't like. For example, my Firefox doesn't try/offer to turn on the wifi.
- I can also exclude entire packages that I don't like, because the entire dependency chains can be eliminated by disabling USE flags. For example, none of my systems have systemd or dbus. Since last year I don't even have openrc anymore (the other Gentoo service manager). One of them doesn't even have udev. I tweaked it so much, I'm not even sure I can still call it Gentoo.
Daily Gentoo desktop user since 2007. Compilations/ricing is one thing, the variety and flexibility of the portage and USE flag system is another. For me it just makes sense to stay with this proven distro. I use Ubuntu variants on my work PC and they just have all this crap that I don't have to tolerate on my gentoo installs.
The docs were great for learning. And it made it so easy to recompile the kernel because it was right in the initial setup and you just had to walk through it again.
I used it on an off as my daily machine for around 15-20 years I think. It is fast in terms of execution-on-hardware speed, and genuinely puts you in control. For a certain kind of user this is more important than anything.
These days I'm on OSX mostly because of the frequency of business trips meant I needed something small and portable a few years ago, and now the hardware is so much better than what you can get for the PC world. Plus, I am hyper-conscious of my time and can't really afford to be fiddling with new system libraries, kernel configurations and so forth.
Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall, and after enough iterations I'd started to err to Ubuntu at some point. But it was by far the most fun of any Linux I used, save perhaps Slackware which was my first.
I think in a few years' time the next machine I build will be a non-Apple ARM custom portable, hopefully running Gentoo, with a lot of custom machining and hardware features.
> at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall
My advice is to start using btrfs snapshots. Make a backup snapshot, run the updates, and if anything breaks, just "btrfs set-default" to the backup snapshot and everything is working again.
Compiling Chromium took absolutely forever 5+ years ago. I think a whole system took like 20% of the time that Chromium would take to compile. I can't even imagine with rust extensions added on top now. Gentoo was so awesome though but I had to switch to debian because I would just play with my configuration all the time and break things. One day I hope to return to using it though or setup another machine to use it.
Firefox is bad to compile yourself, because it's slow and often requires a library version you don't have, such as a new ICU version. Updating ICU also requires you to build packages that depend on it: harfbuzz, ffmpeg, qt5, poppler and the list goes on.
Chromium takes it to a whole new level. While Linux packages typically have an automake flow (configure, make, make install) Chromium requires ninja, not just ninja but a specific version depending on the Chromium version. Then you need a ton of libraries with specific versions (or custom patches) or use the built-in versions provided by chromium, which may or may not compile at all. Then there is clang, while most software is compiler agnostic, Chromium does not compile with gcc. Of course, it needs a specific clang release, sometimes even a pre-release, or again a load of patches to compile. It seems the chromium build process is mostly built by engineers desperate to reinvent the wheel. While everything can work fine with sane Linux defaults (GCC, automake, system libraries) they convinced themselves their software is so complex and unique it requires a special treatment.
But I didn't last for very long. I remember starting the install for a bigger app before going to bed, only to find the thing still building when I woke up. And as for the dream of more tailored builds, I never really noticed anything much different - I probably was too uneducated about build configurations, or - more likely - the differences just didn't matter too much.
Eventually, I switched to Ubuntu and never looked back.
So, I'm curious - is anyone using Gentoo as their daily driver, and what is the main incentive for you?
- It makes it very very easy to patch any package before they're installed - just put the patches in /etc/portage/patches/<pkg name>/, and that includes the kernel too.
- I can exclude package features that I don't like. For example, my Firefox doesn't try/offer to turn on the wifi.
- I can also exclude entire packages that I don't like, because the entire dependency chains can be eliminated by disabling USE flags. For example, none of my systems have systemd or dbus. Since last year I don't even have openrc anymore (the other Gentoo service manager). One of them doesn't even have udev. I tweaked it so much, I'm not even sure I can still call it Gentoo.
These days I'm on OSX mostly because of the frequency of business trips meant I needed something small and portable a few years ago, and now the hardware is so much better than what you can get for the PC world. Plus, I am hyper-conscious of my time and can't really afford to be fiddling with new system libraries, kernel configurations and so forth.
Frankly Gentoo was never polished, at some point the system state would break and you'd have to reinstall, and after enough iterations I'd started to err to Ubuntu at some point. But it was by far the most fun of any Linux I used, save perhaps Slackware which was my first.
I think in a few years' time the next machine I build will be a non-Apple ARM custom portable, hopefully running Gentoo, with a lot of custom machining and hardware features.
My advice is to start using btrfs snapshots. Make a backup snapshot, run the updates, and if anything breaks, just "btrfs set-default" to the backup snapshot and everything is working again.