Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: n952162 <n952162@×××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2021 12:53:56
Message-Id: 50b0bf42-9ba0-beca-2b36-504c6ed41bc3@web.de
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives by Rich Freeman
1 On 6/7/21 2:03 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
2 > On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 4:10 AM n952162 <n952162@×××.de> wrote:
3 >> I'm looking for a gentoo alternative and am surprised to see that google chrome os is based on gentoo.
4 > Uh, you might want to read up more on what ChromeOS is. While you can
5 > in theory run it on anything, it is designed basically to power
6 > Chromebooks. It is closer to something like Android than something
7 > like Ubuntu/etc.
8 >
9 >> Do they support multi-media and basic modern desktop capabilities?
10 > Yes. Emphasis on "basic."
11 >
12 >> I see that there's some concentration on a special browser, but I'd be running Firefox and FVWM anyway.
13 > If you want to run anything other than Chrome, good luck. Maybe you
14 > could get Firefox to run. Running fvwm is going to be much harder to
15 > pull off. Really at that point I'm not sure why you'd even start with
16 > ChromeOS since running Chrome with their special DE is the entire
17 > point of the distro.
18 >
19 >> Do they use portage and source packages?
20 > Yes and yes. However, the build system doesn't install portage, so
21 > you can't do updates using portage. The OS is designed to be packaged
22 > as a read-only system image and updates are performed by updating the
23 > system image. It is a completely non-traditional distro.
24 >
25 >> Do they push down every single upstream modification, like gentoo does, or maybe have a bit of hysteresis?
26 > I imagine the upstream repo has a big emphasis on security updates,
27 > but probably doesn't stay current on every little library. Just look
28 > at Chrome and the state of its own bundled libs if you use the
29 > upstream repo (which Gentoo goes to a lot of work to strip out).
30 >
31 > Really, if you want to run ChromeOS just go buy a Chromebook for $150.
32 > Trying to roll your own is great if you want to experiment, but it
33 > definitely isn't doing things "the easy way."
34 >
35
36 Okay, good info, thank you.