Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Marat BN <maratbn@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives
Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2021 00:28:48
Message-Id: defd8fc0-fab8-8961-0efc-4665904573f4@gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives by n952162
1 Chrome OS is made by Google to run specifically on the Chromebooks. I
2 don't think it is intended for general computing and there is no
3 enthusiast community around it like around other distros.
4
5 The closest cousin to Gentoo would be Funtoo. It used to be that Gentoo
6 Portage could only use rsync, while Funtoo Portage could use git which
7 is much faster, but since then Gentoo Portage has also gained the
8 functionality to use git for this purpose.
9
10 My biggest problem with Gentoo was not so much the time needed to
11 compile huge ebuilds like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Chromium, but that
12 say if you neglected doing updates for a while and then decided to start
13 again, then you'd have serious problems. This is because, at least the
14 way I understood it, after some time old ebuilds would get deleted from
15 the Portage servers to conserve space there, but some of those now
16 deleted ebuilds would still be needed as dependencies to do iterative
17 updates. The sure-way to resolve this problem would be to re-emerge the
18 whole @world set, which of course would take way-longer than just
19 Firefox, and might work differently because the '/etc/' configuration
20 schema might have changed.
21
22 In my case I had some weird problem either emerging some ebuild or
23 keeping an old version of an ebuild to keep the functionality or the
24 '/etc/' schema removed in the new versions. I just let things sit, and
25 moved on to other projects. But when later on I tried to go back to the
26 original issue, I had even more trouble because now I was even further
27 behind @world, and more ebuilds would not upgrade because of deleted
28 dependencies.
29
30 So to sum it up, my problem with Gentoo was that you could not just do
31 iterative updates after long periods of inactivity. You pretty much had
32 to emerge daily and if you had some problem then drop everything and fix
33 it right away, or else you'll fall even further behind and eventually
34 might have to rebuild @world. And so because constant attention
35 intervention and trial and error was required you could not just compile
36 huge ebuilds overnight and go about your life during the day.
37
38 The distro I would recommend to look at now is NixOS -- it is also
39 source-based, but if you have problems with one package that will not
40 prevent you from keeping the rest of the system up to date. Upstream
41 changes are pulled pretty regularly. And even though it is
42 source-based, you download most packages pre-compiled. However if you
43 want to you can tweak the source and re-compile locally. You can also
44 keep multiple versions of the same package. You also do not mess
45 directly with the '/etc/' files for individual packages, instead you
46 specify a global configuration "recipe" in
47 '/etc/nixos/configuration.nix', which is used to generate the
48 package-specific '/etc/' files. This layer of abstraction improves
49 reliability and allows easy config cloning across machines.
50
51 The down-side is that NixOS has a radically-different paradigm that
52 takes a while to wrap your head around, requires learning the Nix
53 Expression Language (which is radically-different too), and is not yet
54 that "mature" so theoretically things can break, but I would still
55 recommend it over Chrome OS.
56
57
58 -- Marat
59
60
61 On 6/7/21 1:10 AM, n952162 wrote:
62 > I'm looking for a gentoo alternative and am surprised to see that google
63 > chrome os is based on gentoo.
64 >
65 > Does anybody have any experience with this?
66 >
67 > Do they support multi-media and basic modern desktop capabilities?  I
68 > see that there's some concentration on a special browser, but I'd be
69 > running Firefox and FVWM anyway.
70 >
71 > Do they use /portage/ and source packages?
72 >
73 > Do they push down every single upstream modification, like gentoo does,
74 > or maybe have a bit of hysteresis?
75 >
76 > I updated on May first and built firefox 78.10.*0*.  2+ days of
77 > building.  I updated on June first and built firefox  78.10.*1*. and
78 > spent 2+ days building.  I updated today because of the same old slot
79 > collision problems I've run into over a year
80 >
81 > dev-python/setuptools:0
82 > dev-python/setuptools_scm:0
83 > dev-python/toml:0
84 > dev-python/certifi:0
85 > dev-python/jinja:0
86 > dev-python/markupsafe:0
87 >
88 > and now, on the 7th, I'm building firefox 78.11.   I just don't have the
89 > time for this.  It impacts my machines too much.
90 >
91 > Yes, I know, there are binary versions, but if I wanted to use binary, I
92 > wouldn't use gentoo.  And anyway, there's always rust and gcc and ...
93 >
94 >

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