Re: [gentoo-user] Would a Thinkpad X200 be too much trouble too run gentoo on?

[Dex Conner]

On 22/04/21 09:09AM, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On Thu, 2022-04-21 at 15:49 +0300, Dex Conner wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > So I've found a Thinkpad X200 online and I'm thinking of buying it for
> > libreboot purposes. Do you think the P8600 cpu can handle all the
> > compiling on gentoo? For the record, I don't have any of the "big stuff"
> > like KDE, GNOME, Firefox (all I have is Tor Browser [which I don't
> > compile], dwl and some terminal programs like neomutt and profanity).
> > Surely, I wouldn't be spending 5 hours to do small upgrades,
> > right?..right?
> >
> >
>
> It's getting harder and harder. There's always GCC, which is going to
> take you most of the day to build and will probably require -j1 to keep
> you from running out of memory. But aside from that, the big ones are
>
>   * dev-lang/rust: pulled in by anything that needs SVG support unless 
>     you unmask an old insecure version of librsvg or can tolerate half-
>     broken SVG support. This takes over 24h, requires -j1, and gets
>     worse every day because it bundles all of its (growing list of) 
>     dependencies.
>
>   * LLVM: needed by rust, some video cards, and certain picky packages.
>     This one is at least _legitimately_ large but has annoying point 
>     releases every once in a while that trigger a rebuild for little 
>     benefit. Again, expect ~24h.
>
>   * net-libs/webkit-gtk: if you're avoiding firefox (which is huge, 
>     and requires rust, which is huge), then this is your best bet for 
>     a browser engine. Even if you don't use it directly, other apps
>     like evolution (mail client) can pull it in. It too is huge, just
>     not as bad as the others. This one finishes in something like 18h 
>     for me.
>
> Everything else that's packaged well and uses a sane programming
> language shouldn't give you much trouble.

LLVM is annoying even on my current machine but I already avoid rust
with rust-bin and I don't have webkit-gtk. I'm wondering much of a remedy 
using a T400 with quad core mod would be to that 24h compile time. Not sure 
if it would be worth the 50-70 bucks, though. That's more than what the 
computer costs!