Thread 107005640

the gentoo guys were right all a long.
i have emerged everything i need with some additional use flags and i can clearly measure a difference. not a single build failure out of 700+ ebuilds.

compiled with -Os and everything is lighter on the memory and programs start up faster.
the gentoo schizos were right all along.
it really makes everything a bit faster. enough to be noticeable.

even wine is a bit faster.
even tried an old 90's civilization-game (alpha centauri) and even that processes the turns faster. (it was already fast before but now its even faster)

my computer uses 320mb when booted into wm, before it used about 530mb with an identical set of programs. i still use the old system's kernel and init system and just start the gentoo xorg from a chroot automatically at boot.
emerge is maximum comfy. put it on your computer today. in a chroot, you don't even have to install gentoo from scratch. you can try out gentoo within the comfort of your current distro.
take your time to compile right and re-compile if you regret any use flags. its worth it!

>>107005640 (OP)
Right, Gentoo's my favorite OS. Others just feel lacking in comparison.

>>107005640 (OP)
I only remember the time when some Gantoo updates broke my system and I couldn't fix it. After 3 days I reinstalled Windows. Been years since. Maybe things are different now.

I'm running Guix system but i use binary substitutes. Maybe I'll away to source only. Running on an old think pad. Wondering if i can get the benefits of gentoo but keep the declarative configuration of guix

>>107005707
its just too different.

after all these years, i now realize there are only two distros out there:
source-first or binaries-first.

with binary-first distros, you will always compromise on features and usually have to jump hoops to compile (on a system-wide scale)
most distros make it way too hard to recompile everything from source. in gentoo, thats just normal.

lets say i want to re-compile everything, in slackware or debian or whatever, there is no straightforward way to do them all in one sitting
its usually on a package by package basis, never at scale like gentoo.

and if you ever got the taste of compiling stuff for efficiency, you know that on anything than gentoo its basically pain in the ass.

>>107005722
>Gantoo updates broke my system and I couldn't fix it.
didn't happen
it was your fault
and things shouldn't change just to accommodate for the lowest common denominator (you)

>>107005787
I mean, this says more about dynamic linking being a gimmick and a hack than about anything else

>>107005743
see if you can add the -Os optimization flag to every build in your guix system and rebuild everything.
-Os optimizes for lower memory usage and its just as safe as -O2 so no worries about unexpected stuff.

also, one can not blame package maintainers for not optimizing anything because they have millions of people to cater to.
thats why you must take the matter in your hands.

>>107005640 (OP)
What's your WM/DE? Post USE flags

>>107005817
Listen kid, some people here are adults. Let them do the talking.

Things open up 500 microseconds faster but take hours to compile. Its still the meme distro.
>for servers
Most web host providers dont offer gentoo

>>107005830
fluxbox

COMMON_FLAGS="-Os -pipe -march=native"

USE="elogind X acl amd64 bzip2 cet crypt gdbm iconv ipv6 libtirpc multilib ncurses nls openmp pam pcre readline seccomp ssl test-rust unicode xattr zlib \
jpeg harfbuzz pulseaudio jack alsa truetype xinerama xpm \
postproc apng secure-delete"


i didn't change much. the defaults are already slimmed down. i just had to add a few features as i went a long.
picrel are the package.use files. (separate files of course, i just just dumped all of them on screen)

>>107005640 (OP)
>source-based, yet no reproducible builds
>overlays are just a convenient excuse for the shitty official repos that many users fall for
>users and developers alike in complete denial over the amount of time it takes to compile software
>"customizable" distribution, yet it's getting less and less choice and devs discourage anything but orthodox configs all the time
>circlejerking maintainers who coc competent ones into obvlivion
>use flags and all that other shit ultimately makes no perceivable difference on a desktop
>most bloated distribution of all: needs build-time dependencies by default and keeps all the sources (removing build dependencies is not practical since they are needed for updates anyway)
>hundreds of unsolved bugs that are ignored at best and brushed off as unimportant at worst
>untested, shit breaks even on the stable branch and isn't fixed for months. its "stability" is a complete myth
>openrc sucks. it being the default is basically just a marketing point since it works better with systemd anyway, a lot less people would give a shit about gentoo if it weren't for this
>boasts about supporting many architectures, yet only x86 and amd64 have a non-shit selection of packages
>"unstable" branch is slow as shit, far from being "bleeding edge". even debian sid is better in this regard
>literally won't merge valid prs to fix bugs and deficiencies in the repos even after having been properly audited and approved
>original author doesn't even use it on desktops, he's a macfag

Is Gentoo just an elaborate prank?

>>107005824
>-Os optimizes for lower memory usage
No it doesn't. It optimized for code size.

>>107005932
if you run a server 24/7 and some binary is run every minute, then you definitely notice the improvement.

improvements like these are meant to scale.
if you don't need to scale something then there is less of a point but if you get a gain of 10% and you consider that over 1 year, then the gains are massive.
you need to think bigger

>>107005787
On Gentoo, you compromise your time.

Enjoy your youth while it lasts.

i kinda agree but im not going back to gentoo oh no my mpv on arch lacks libcaca output support sigh not recompiling it either

>>107005787
>most distros make it way too hard to recompile everything from source.
Explain what kind of problem you had compiling from source on anything other than Gentoo.

>>107005977
>lib caca
Who invents these ridiculous names? Linux ecosystem is full of cringe inducing names like that.

>>107005967
what do you think gets loaded into memory?

>>107005932
> user gets a speedup
> computer compiles to make it happen
As it should be.

>>107005974
Then compile the binary on ubuntu

Gentoo is meh, emerge is slow, repos are anemic and full of outdated stuff, overlays are a mess. Nothing beats having your own distro, no more overlays, no more AUR, update when you want. best life.

>>107005976
Cool story, bro. Gentoo's package manager handles compiling for you, and the distro is so stable that it requires less user maintenance than most OSes.

>>107005998
Much more than just the binary, which is why "optimizes for lower memory usage" is at best misleading.

>>107006107
t. started using gentoo two weeks ago

>>107005976
>Enjoy your youth while it lasts.
nobody forced you to ruin your life at 30 gramps

>>107006145
I didn't. In no small part thanks to figuring out Gentoo was a meme before it was too late.

Gentoo just works. I use binhost to speed up installs and upgrades.

>>107006200
Just use a binary distro at that point.

>>107005640 (OP)
from my experience the package conflicts in gentoo are insane
I had to set so many flags in each package just so emerge can continue compiling instead of shitting out errors

>>107006216
But then their screenfetch wouldn't show the Gentoo logo. How are they supposed to impress the other anti-productive losers in the /wg/ desktop threads?

>>107006216
Well that's one way to say you've never used gentoo.

>>107006216
Why? There's nothing special about gentoo. Portage is great, you have sets of packages, such as @system or @world - For user-installed programs, you just say to portage "Hey, add this pkg to the @world set, kthx", then when you upgrade the system or whatever portage pulls that package and its dependencies into your system.

>>107005976
There is no point of youth when women are on strike

>>107005640 (OP)
why do you need to use xorg from chroot?

>>107005787
>there is no straightforward way to do them all in one sitting
>its usually on a package by package basis, never at scale like gentoo.
??

>>107006129
i might not have been precise but Os sure leads to lower memory usage so i dont know how misleading that is.
people are free to find out what Os does exactly but as far as i'm concerned i get lower memory use.

>>107005992
i think its based af probably older than you

>>107006327
how many commands do you need to recompile your whole debian system with -Os gcc option?
will it keep track of everything like gentoo does in the process?

no, its definitely not as straight forward.
of course you can compile where the fuck you want but is it quick and simple? not exactly

>>107006318
having something like steam a non source binary blob and its games also blobbed, segregated from your secure sysyem?

>>107005640 (OP)
I think nix beats gentoo in terms of source based
because of nix purity it could detect changes to a package flags and recompiles the package and all that depends on it, and it's done much efficiently
the only downside is the lack of USE flag

>>107006391
>the only downside
But that's a FUCKING HUGE downside, lol.

>>107006318
because i want as much as possible that i interact with to be compiled a certain way, even x11

also, i have my original distro outputting on tty7 and the chroot on tty8 and i get separate xdm sessions (xdm is extremely light)

gentoo rules. Literally no reason to use anything else as long as I've got a powerful desktop to compile everything when I feel like updating. I could see not liking it if all I had was a broke bitch old thinkpad or something like that though

>>107006422
>I could see not liking it if all I had was a broke bitch old thinkpad or something like that though
In that case you can just set desktop profile, set FEATURES="getbingpkg" and never set any USE flags.

>>107006422
well i do run it on an old bitch thinkpad and it lets me save ram on that shit so even for old stuff its good.
however, it would be nice to use distcc or something. maybe later... firefox (pgo) took 18 hours.
can't say it was worth it though, the official firefox binary is the fastest i've tried yet.

anyway, you can compile when youre afk and just pause the compilation when you need.

>>107006467
Have you looked into other package managers? You could use a second package manager to install prebuilt binary packages.

>>107005640 (OP)
Thanks, but I'm sticking with Arch (which I use, BTW).

>>107005640 (OP)
I don't use it because I am forced to use initramfs with luks. Installed it many times, it was mostly just painful, I would work on something and I would need a dependency, on Arch it installs instantly but on gentoo it takes a while to the point that I do not even remember where I was in my project kek.

Also since gentoo is source based you would expect there to be source somewhere on the system that you could modify, there have been many programs that I would wanted modified before compilation and installation and the closest thing to modifying it is using keepwork feature flag and then finding the ebuild file and painfully checking the build log to compile it manually. It's just a poorly designed system. Not for me, it's pretty much a meme, you are not expected to modify code, but rather just watch it compile for no reason.

>>107006511
>you are not expected to modify code, but rather just watch it compile for no reason.
have you never heard of /etc/portage/patches?

>>107006511
>I don't use it because I am forced to use initramfs with luks
not by gentoo, so if you are suggesting this is a fault of gentoo you're wrong

>>107006520
I have and I have used them but while this may seem like an elegant way to do things, nobody in reality does it except maintainers. When a user modifies code it's usually a quick hack.

>>107006524
You are right, it's the fault of grub for not supporting argon2 and/ or kernel that doesn't support loading those modules first before entry. But this would be a nice change compared to arch where I am not a huge fan of initramfs.

>>107006539
>When a user modifies code it's usually a quick hack.
which you can then run a diff for against the codebase/tag you're building against and throw into patches for the package manager
if you want to do quick dev hacks then just pull the repo and compile manually like upstream would

>>107006491
i've used a few different ones on top of other systems.
nix, guix, pkgsrc, homebrew, apt in a chroot etc.

anyway, if that was the problem, then i'd just use devuan and get all the packages i need.

i just realized that the whole reason for me using linux from the beginning was to have as much as possible control over what i run.
gentoo is just a natural progression.
there is just too much compromising in binary packages.

>>107005640 (OP)
Welcome home, Anon.

>>107006570
pkgsrc is cool and I like it but sadly the linux ports of the packages aren't the best when you get into compiling desktop software.

>>107006554
Yes I know how to find a way around a problem, but there is always a problem. An operating system is there to provide an abstraction so you can achieve something with it, operating system is not a toy. When it comes to gentoo, I still remember trying to emerge cutebrowser and you had some dependencies for it, one of which used some python library that had to be compiled with some rust library, naturally I masked all rust code in portage and it kept complaining, even after adjusting the use flags it kept going in a loop, demanding that rust code, even though it was for a GTK extensions support on a qt based browser. Pretty silly, it's an optional extra not a hard requirement, and yet it failed to look past that dependency. There are many quirks like this that almost all people are not willing to fiddle around with as the resulting system provides very little reward for all that hard work.

>>107006594
qutebrowser*
sounds like a user-created issue in this scenario

>>107006573
i still have my original distro intact.
just making sure its up to date and ready as well. slackware has a nice kernel config defaults so i use that kernel for now. if i ever need a custom kernel i can just mount boot inside the chroot so emerge can work on it. never been this comfy.

>>107006582
pkgsrc is nice to have but it refused to compile about 5 packages ot of 200 or something packages meanwhile gentoo compiled all 700 without a problem.
pkgsrc is nice to have if you run some more exotic stuff like opensolaris forks. gives you instant access to plenty of stuff.

i had explicitly told it to compile its own gcc and use that to compile everything else but it still didn't want to do everything.
i tried it on a debian installation and it worked so i dont know, its probably my fault but i did do everything by the book.

>>107006839
>but it refused to compile about 5 packages ot of 200
AFAIK pkgsrc is meant mainly for BSD's. Probably not many users on linux.

>>107005640 (OP)
>linormie discovers win7 speed

>>107007020
without the deprecated win7 internals

>>107006963
it originated for netbsd but its advertised as cross-platform. people use it on all kinds of systems, not only bsds
regardless, they do a good job considering its not a giant project.

>>107007081
meh

quickpkg, re-generate all installed packages for backup!
>yes, chief!
>*some minutes later*
>done, i put them in /var/cache/binpkgs

emerge, i need you to rebuild gtk with 32 bit support. i just added the flags in package.use/gtk .
>sure thing, boss, first you have to add abi_x86_32 use flags to these dependencies below. after that, we are good to go.
alright, emerge, i did it.
>perfect, here we go.

>>107006467
use another host and chroot into a Gentoo with the portage setup you want and compile the package binaries there, then download them to your laptop so it's a binary only system but you compiled them elsewhere with the use flags you want

>>107007798
if i did this, could i just copy over /etc/portage to the build host and adapt -march to the cpu i want to build for and be ready for building?

gcc already knows how to build for different archs even if its not the host arch right?

>>107008095
yes, though I suspect if the host and chroot are significantly different enough you should probably use binary build tools in the chroot.

there needs to be a revival in interest in source based distros.
since gaming is becoming so big on linux,
more attention could be put on source based distros for actual and efficient debloating of everything.

this way it could attract more developers too.
i'm not playing anything on my old thinkpad but if i had a powerful computer i'd definitely want to squeeze out even more.
people just need to understand how improvements scale.
its not enough to just rebuild one thing trying to make it faster. you need to rebuild everything because dependencies and all kinds of libraries.

obviously there is a certain time investment but the tools are already so mature and easy to use like portage.
there is really no reason not to pick this up. squeezing out more should concern not only those with weaker hardware.
there is a certain elegance to a well-tuned system no matter how new or old it is which is also tangible enough to be worth the trouble.

>>107008299
games are almost exclusively binary

>>107008342
of course. i'm talking about everything that surrounds them.
display server (even if the driver is proprietary, xorg isn't)
sound libraries, basically all the dependencies
wine also. there is a bunch of stuff.

also, there are some kernel tweaks but anything i did was mostly related to sound. anyway, most distribution kernel configs are pretty heavy these days and could probably be lightened up. also, some scheduler tweaks might be useful.

Os vs Ofast bros

>>107009247
Ofast should only be applied where it doesnt mess with floating point correctness.
it also includes everything in O3 which is opposite in memory use to Os.
Os is supposed to be best for size,
O3 disregards size in favour of speed

at least thats what i picked up

>>107009247
but speed can be had in different ways.
by reducing the amount of things to be worked on or by trying to optimize how you work without reducing size.

intuitevly it seems like reducing size would have a better chance of showing improvement. at least for me.

also, compiling with 32 bit pointers greatly reduces ram usage. you first need to enable x32 abi support (not to be confused with old school 32 bit abi)
and then you compile programs for x32.

even running vanilla 32 bit programs nets great memory savings but you don't get the 64 bit advantages of x32

the benefit in ram consumption can be as big as 30%

>>107005640 (OP)
I don't really see the point in running Gentoo when Nix/Guix exist. What are the advantages of Gentoo compared to those? Still I'll probably try Gentoo myself someday for fun.

>>107009522
you don't see the point in running something you know nothing about. nice. brilliant job telling on yourself being a low-iodine low-iq cretin

>>107009558
no need to get so defensive desu

>>107009565
nice way to try and dodge the retardation allegations. didn't work tho

>>107009625
do all gentoo users have an inferiority complex?

Do you actually know how to program in C OP? Your distribution likely compiled most packages with -O2, which would produce more performant code than -Os. Did you pass -march=native? Did you pass additional optimization flags like -ftree-vectorize? -frunroll-loops? Many/most makefiles, particularly for smaller projects will omit these flags.

Anyway OP, I think this will be a good learning experience.

Been using the same Gentoo hardened profile installation with a bunch of manually set USE flags for ten years now. It just works and it's comfy. Compiling a new kernel & modules takes five minutes at 19 niceness, dunno what people are kvetching about wasting time compiling so much.

>>107006107
You can't seriously think it's stable? I used gentoo for 3 years on an old thinkpad. Because updates would take so long, I would update at least 2 weeks apart. The amount of breakages I experienced during this time was very high. I had problems with chromium, ruby, ffmpeg, and that's just the ones I can remember. And the migration to the more up-to-date profile was an even bigger pain. On gentoo, you have to actually read and act on the mail the maintainers send you through portage, or you will break the system and have to ask sam_ on liberaIRC's #gentoo channel about fixing your system, again. It's very far from stable. I'm glad someone like you is passionate and is keeping the gentoo userbase alive, but I'd like to warn you that it's very far from stable, and requires x10 maintenance of a stable distribution.

>>107009815
gentoo IS a stable distribution by default. you have to explicitly unmask unstable packages and breakages are basically non existent if you stick to stable and the "mainstream" profiles

>>107005817
can you statically link everything on a gentoo system? is that something people even do? memory is so cheap and it basically eliminates most of the complexity of a package manager that I feel like it should just be the norm at this point.

>>107005640 (OP)
Windows 11 IoT LTSC
Mint
Gentoo
BSD’s
Those are really the only options everything else is a meme.

>>107009815
Almost none of the people praising Gentoo actually use it, they just like the idea.

Even the original author, Daniel Robbins, stopped running it long ago, at least on desktops.

>>107010301
>it's been in the repo for one month == stable

>>107009635
Sunk cost fallacy syndrome is one hell of a drug.

>>107006247
I've used it for long enough to realize it's a waste of time.

>>107005722
this happened to me once because i followed a meme advice of setting

```ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~amd64"```

If you stay on stable usually nothing happens, and after a while if updating your system fails, probably you need to manually update some libraries first.

>>107011457
>ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64 ~amd64"
>drwx------ 2 root root 16K Sep 21 2013 lost+found
skill issue