Re: [gentoo-user] gentoo alternatives

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jun 7, 2021 at 4:10 AM n952162 <n952162@×××.de> wrote:
>
> I'm looking for a gentoo alternative and am surprised to see that google chrome os is based on gentoo.

Uh, you might want to read up more on what ChromeOS is.  While you can
in theory run it on anything, it is designed basically to power
Chromebooks.  It is closer to something like Android than something
like Ubuntu/etc.

> Do they support multi-media and basic modern desktop capabilities?

Yes.  Emphasis on "basic."

>  I see that there's some concentration on a special browser, but I'd be running Firefox and FVWM anyway.

If you want to run anything other than Chrome, good luck.  Maybe you
could get Firefox to run.  Running fvwm is going to be much harder to
pull off.  Really at that point I'm not sure why you'd even start with
ChromeOS since running Chrome with their special DE is the entire
point of the distro.

> Do they use portage and source packages?

Yes and yes.  However, the build system doesn't install portage, so
you can't do updates using portage.  The OS is designed to be packaged
as a read-only system image and updates are performed by updating the
system image.  It is a completely non-traditional distro.

> Do they push down every single upstream modification, like gentoo does, or maybe have a bit of hysteresis?

I imagine the upstream repo has a big emphasis on security updates,
but probably doesn't stay current on every little library.  Just look
at Chrome and the state of its own bundled libs if you use the
upstream repo (which Gentoo goes to a lot of work to strip out).

Really, if you want to run ChromeOS just go buy a Chromebook for $150.
Trying to roll your own is great if you want to experiment, but it
definitely isn't doing things "the easy way."

-- 
Rich