Re: [gentoo-user] it keeps growing

[Frank Steinmetzger]

Am Tue, Jun 01, 2021 at 09:13:45AM -0500 schrieb Dale:

> I was thinking along the lines of how many packages even binary distros
> have to update.  I've installed binary based distros before and when
> updating those, there can be hundreds, several hundred, packages to
> upgrade.  Thing is, those same packages exist in Gentoo.  If one has a
> very similar set of packages installed, odds are, almost the same
> packages will update in either a source based distro like Gentoo or in a
> binary based distro.  The only difference is Gentoo compiles from source. 

And that you can’t pick your dependencies. I am doomed to use KDE with
semantic desktop enabled, which includes having a metadata sidebar in
Gwenview that uses 50 % of its space for something I don’t use. :-/

> If one is really concerned about compile times or the amount of power
> needed to run Gentoo up to date, then one has to question not the
> updates but why use Gentoo??

That’s the main reason I went for Arch on my desktop systems. I grew weary
of compile times (and portage’s ever growing complexity which caused an ever
growing Calculating dependencies phase). On Arch, an update, even on a
Pentium-M (meaning single core, 1,5 GHz), was blazingly first.

OTOH I am also annoyed by Arch’s high-volume updates. Sometimes a lib is
changed and I need to re-download 100s of MBs of new packages that are only
rebuilt for that new version of the dependency. In such a case I simply
abort the upgrade. There is no point (save for critical security updates).
I did the same on Gentoo: if there was, e.g.,  a teeny update to qt, or a
forced rebuild due to some use flag change, I simply postponed the rebuild
until there was an actual upgrade to be had from it, like a new KDE version.

> While some large packages are available in
> binary, Firefox, Libreoffice etc, the vast majority of Gentoo is
> compiled from source.  It's why most people use Gentoo, compile from
> source with features set like you want.

Gentoo was my very first distro and kept that position for many years. Why?
Well, the most important reason for me was the colourful default bash
prompt, believe it or not. It is just so much more readable that an
all-white wall of text (I’m looking at you, apt-get).

I am grateful for what it taught me, like configuring and building one’s own
kernel, handling build errors, understanding the file system, even the
principle of “everything is a file”™, and living on the CLI (which I still
do in Arch).
This all laid the foundation for my professional life. My first job was as
an admin and my only real “education” in that area was my years-long fiddling
with my Gentoo systems. (I have a uni’s degree, but I studied something
rather different.) But very soon after I started that job, I noticed a lot
less desire to sit in front of a Linux terminal all day at home, also, just
to “play” with Linux. Plus I now had a lot less time on my hands.

> If one is limited in hardware or power, Gentoo may not be a good option. 

Well, back in the day I ran Gentoo on everything, including a puny netbook
with an Intel Atom N450. Just building the package tree for emerge -uDNpv
took 17 minutes. I once compiled Firefox on it out of fun; it took almost 24
hours (and there was no noticeable speed increase over the binary package,
which I always used).

I live in Germany, where bureaucracy and lobby interests lead to one of the
highest prices on electricity on the whole planet (or at least Europe).
Power consumption was a motivator for me, not only for fiscal reasons, but
also from an environmental POV. Just because I can do something, doesn’t
mean I have to if I can have the (almost) same result with a fraction of the
effort. But that’s for another thread.

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