Hey All,
I've basically tried all Linux distros under the sun, except for Gentoo.
I just attempted my first install. Got quite far, but it has been having constant failures with compiling qt4. Gonna give another go at it.
Just curious on the Level1tech communities thoughts on Gentoo and if it is worth it due to it's source-based nature. This would be for 'daily tasks': document writing, coding, web browsing, some gaming etc.
loosen up your optimization flags. You can't -o3 everything.
Not sure what I could do differently, because it's having failures compiling from the eselect profile when you first install the OS.
For sake of time, I'm gonna just choose the standard systemd profile then worry about plasma later.
I used to do stage1 installs back in the single core pentiumIII era... and it would take over a day.
What I'd end up doing is getting binaries, and then recompiling the packages once they were updated.
So, over time, you end up with a fully compiled system, but not initially.
I haven't run gentoo in a while... Windows 7 made me complacent. But time is running out for me, and I gotta go back.
That's actually a very tempting idea.
I assume it'd be safe to compile the kernel (I don't want nouveau out of the box, gonna use proprietary) then continue with binaries from there?
Yeah.
Id usually compile everything up to a text system... and then install binaries for the desktop environment, firefox, etc.
dont do a systemd install your first time.
You will fail repeatably. ask @Kat
Systemd install is harder to do because you have to supplement parts of the install guide with the systemd guide.
thanks
Gentoo is relatively easy to install when you understand how Portage works. this includes Use flags. how to edit config files, and fixing compilation errors and how to quickly configure a kernel when necessary.
Gentoo itself does not use Systemd as its default init system. which if you don't know. Systemd is the standard init system for just about all distros except for enterprise grade distros (RedHat, CentOS and so on) so it's on Arch Linux, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Mint the list goes on just about all the popular ones you've probably considering using.
In all honesty is it worth the hassle of setting up Gentoo? no. is it an excellent learning experience? yes. how fast gentoo will be compiling packages depends on how fast your hardware is. Firefox will take like an hour to compile and install, Chromium takes like an hour. it's not worth if, if you just want to use it and go. also it's worth noting Networking is just a pain in the ass to set up too. 9 times out 10 you won't have network connectivity. cause it's not enabled by default.
For web browsing, install www-client/firefox-bin if you don't want to compile it. Right now, firefox-bin is newer than the stable source code version (51 vs 46). Chromium is source only.
For documents, install app-office/libreoffice-bin if you don't want to compile it.
In my opinion, one of the greatest things about Gentoo is that you can have an as stable or as bleeding edge system as you want. Expect breakage if you go full bleeding edge. Either way, expect a lot of wiki/man pages reading. And if it's your first time kernel compiling expect things not to work as expected at first.