Re: [gentoo-amd64] Re: How much value does llvm provide for a low-use laptop?

[Mark Knecht]

On Sun, Apr 23, 2017 at 5:18 AM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
>
> Mark Knecht posted on Sat, 22 Apr 2017 11:38:59 -0700 as excerpted:
>
> > As for my wife's laptop which started this discussion I had an emerge 2
> > weeks ago of about 200 packages, mostly KDE, which took almost 24 hours
> > to build on a 5-6 year old laptop.This time around I have about 175
> > packages today. We'll see how long it takes as a data point but I've
> > decided to move her to Ubuntu. I think I need to be spending my time
> > more productively than building this much code this often. I already run
> > Ubuntu as a VM on my Gentoo machine due to apps not supported (or not
> > building correctly) by Gentoo in portage. Sad as it will be the first
> > non-Gentoo boot in my house in about 15 years.
>
> Is her laptop 64-bit or only 32-bit?  Either way, how many other machines
> of similar bitness do you have around?  (I'm presuming all x86 or amd64,
> no arm/mips/ppc/whatever.)

Her laptop is an 64-bit i7 Q740 processor @ 1.73G. 8GB DRAM, two
500MB drives. It was sold as a Gaming Laptop probably 5 years ago

I already keep the CPU and USE flags pretty similar.

I certainly could chroot a specific copy of Gentoo and build on my
machine. I might also be able to build binary packages on my fast
machine and then do an emerge -k type install and see if it works.

However, in the end how much do I gain for all that work vs installing
Kubuntu? The Gentoo portage overlay environment sort of comes and
goes depending on what overlay and how interested someone is in
supporting it. For my needs, and certainly for my wife's needs, Ubuntu
is supporting all the apps I need. I had problems with Handbrake on
Gentoo for over a year. No one fixed it. I created an Unbuntu VM
and just run it in there. Updating that VM is no more than 1-2 minutes
a week for the last few months. It does feel foreign compared to years
of running portage, but it works just fine.

I have this Ubuntu 64-bit VM and I have a 64-bit Gentoo VM on my big
machine. I cannot measure any real speed differences in the two VMs
so I doubt I'll see any big differences on her laptop, at least not such
that the wife would complain about it. It's more about that it boots up,
goes to the network and is easy to backup her data. She uses Chrome,
OpenOffice and not much else.

I've really not figured out the whole developer tools/kernel build process
on Ubuntu but if it was ever important I'm sure the info is out there. For
her machine it's a non-issue. For my big machine it would be more
important as I'm heavily RAID-ed but I'm not ready to dump Gentoo on
this box quite yet, but I think it's coming. I use Matlab with a lot of
NVidia
GPU coding and neither work perfectly on Gentoo. (But both are very
good.)

Anyway, I think the writing it on the wall. My machines are just tools
these days. Not so much into tinkering anymore with this stuff.

Thanks for the inputs.

Cheers,
Mark