So you may have heard of the install gentoo meme, when I looked the guidebook I thought it looked a little complex like with Arch.
Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not? Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.
Isn’t there a Gentoo installer like with Arch? With Arch I can confidently just run the installer on a VM but I got stuck with Gentoo
There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:
Linux Airlines
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”
Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.
Does Gentoo have something special that other distros do not?
Isn’t there a Gentoo installer like with Arch?
Nope. That’s the “something special”. You do it manually with the help of a very well written handbook and learn a great deal about how an os works. IMO a great experience.
Gentoo is the epitome of RTFM. It is beyond the Arch install in “complexity”.
Gentoo is basically arch but built around everything being compiled locally. There isn’t to my knowledge any “Gentoo-install”, but if you can manage to install arch manually it should be quite similar. Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
There is literally a gentoo-install: https://github.com/oddlama/gentoo-install
Gentoo is a bit more complex than arch so if installing Gentoo manually seems daunting I would recommend staying on arch.
Why? How will he progress if he don’t try harder things?
There is still a lot to learn from running arch before you try gentoo
Fair enough, personally I prefer to skip a few steps and then try to figure out what’s going on. It’s not the best approach, but I find it more interesting.
You can get Gentoo up and running pretty quickly by following the handbook. From memory it’s easy to miss one or two clear instructions because the styling of the handbook can add more eye-catching weight to the explanation than the actual commands. So be sure to re-read areas where things don’t seem to working out.
Gentoo also has a binary repo if you don’t plan to stray from whatever installation profile defaults you start off with.
I can’t confirm a simple server install of Gentoo is somehow more lean than any other distribution.
I’ve used gentoo-install with success previously although I don’t know how up to date it is.
Apparently you can use the USE FLAGS to determine what stuff you want and it’s meant to be even more lean on resources.
True and false; the “something special” in Gentoo is that you can tailor it to fit to your needs, and as far as I know no other distro comes even close - maybe the now almost defuct Funtoo. The “it’s more lean on resources” always seemed to me like a strawman people don’t like it came up with to diss on Gentoo.
The “it’s more lean on resources” always seemed to me like a strawman people don’t like it came up with to diss on Gentoo.
Wait but isn’t being more lean a good thing? Or am I misunderstanding how they’re using that word?
Of course it’s a good thing, but it’s not something Gentoo is particuarly goot at it (nor any distro, that is) but its detractors claim Gentoo says is “lean on resources” only to “debunk” that.
And the myth that is “supercomplicated”, but in the end the only “difficult” part is to install it - in the daily, pedestrian usage it’s pretty much like any other (rolling release) distro. Well, of course except package installation/update times, but it’s beyond to me why people created that false urgency of needing to have everything installed and updated the second you issued the command. It’s not like you won’t be able to use your computer at all while Portage does its thing.
The point of use flags is to make it so if you don’t want to print, every package that would otherwise pull in CUPS as a dependency can be compiled without it. Stuff like that.
Gentoo also has a good system for handling multiple concurrent installs of different versions of some packages, e.g python.
If there’s software you want to install from source that uses automake it’s pretty simple to build your own package for it.
Very much a system for doing things your way, and a good way to learn linux IMO. To that end, no there is no installer, but the process is not that complex. Boot a live USB, partition and format a drive, download and extract a base system, install a kernel (there is a fits-most-needs one available now), install a bootloader. Reboot into your new system and continue installing what you need from there.
“Install Gentoo” is a meme, not life advice. With Gentoo, the installation process gives you good insight in to the internals of Linux systems and compiling (almost) everything from source is interesting, but won’t produce noticeable benefits for average users. Especially since updates take some time, what with compiling the programs again. Gentoo is a great distro with a fantastic package manager, but unless you’re an enthusiast or a serious hobbyist, Don’t Install Gentoo.
Frankly i found the Gentoo handbook much easier to follow then the arch wiki at the time I tried both. Just compiling everything takes a while to do.
The installer is the handbook.
USE flags are freakin’ awesome.
It can let you install two different versions of a library.
You can install the binary versions of some big packages like firefox.
Edit: while USE flags are generic, you can also set specific per-package flags.
The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.
Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.
Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.
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How are each of those special? And how are others, inc. Gentoo, almost the same?
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I did not mean it like that, at all.
You leave a comment saying these are special and all the others are more or less the same, but don’t explain how that’s the case.
I am genuinely asking.
(also sorry for posting thrice, internet issues)
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Nice overview, don’t want to contest anything you said, just add my 2 cents to it.
The truth is the lines have gotten awfully blurry the past decade. It’s not just about FHS(basically a standard how the file system is laid out, where binaries go etc) getting more or less phased out(there are dozens of places where binaries can end up these days for example) but also some deeper changes of how we run software on these distributions.
Frankly arch and cachyos(which is a arch variant, yes it has optimised packages, but so does opensuse, it’s just a decision to leave behind compatibility with older hardware, not some inherent magic) belong into the standard Linux distro bin for me, they do nothing special or noteworthy beyond being competently implemented. They are not really different from Debian, fedora or Ubuntu, you can install those just the same manual way you do arch. Yes arch is rolling and others are release based but opensuse shows how there isn’t that much difference between the models, they run both on the same package base, as did Debian with its sid repo since forever.
Then we have gentoo and yes it is a bit special even today. The idea behind it is that you compile your own packages instead of using a binary repo. But why? The answer to that is that when you compile a package from source you have a vast influence on the resulting binary, for example by giving instruction to the compiler, that’s how cachyos gets its optimised binaries. But another even larger influence is by using configuration options built into the package by its developers. For example to disable or enable certain parts of the code. What gentoo did was collect and categorise the most common of these options into what became known as use flags, a system configuration that affects every single package built on that system. If you add the -dvd use flag it will strip dvd support from any package that has it. Or maybe you don’t have a printer -cups will remove cups support from all packages. This doesn’t just not install cups, it removes the very support of cups from packages that would otherwise interact/look for it in some way. This has obvious security advantages and is where the notion of gentoo being a lean system comes from, you’re stripping out entire functions of code from your binaries. If there is a bug in a certain OpenSSL mode that’s included in all binaries shipped by other distros, but you have deactivated all modes besides the one you intend to use, you are not affected by the bug. The idea behind gentoo is a kind of customisation that goes beyond the package layer, you’re no longer just choosing your individual packages but also the options of these packages.
As for the others, immutable, declaratives, cow or a/b root distros… that’s where the lines are getting blurry. The declarative like Nixos are very different in their implementation, but then again, you can use the nix package manager on other distros and we have been using docker containers set up declaratively via compose files for years by now. Likewise the immutable seem very alien, until you realise that they are only divided from their normal counterparts by a very thin line, important yes, but thin nonetheless. There is a reason these new distros get spearheaded by the old guard, a fedora workstation distro is very similar to a fedora silverblue immutable and from opensuse tumbleweed it’s a very close step to opensuse microOS. It’s mostly different default packages and some config options with an added package or two. Sure they seem very different, but just because you bolt the hood of your car closed doesn’t fundamentally change it does it?
These days I’d say gentoo is for learning. Not just about Linux but about interacting with source code and learning about the individual software you choose to install. The optimisations frankly matter less these days, sure you can optimise for speed or size of the binaries but are you going to be able to tell on that 12 core machine with 2 TB of nvme storage? No, not really. Security through a lean system might be nice, but there are specialised distros that already do so and you can run software in their own namespaces, control them via SElinux, put them in jails, bubblewrap them, containerise or VM them, hell even flatpak them, all probably more effective ways of archiving security.
Different person, but I’ll try to explain some of what I know.
Traditional Linux:
- read/write root and usr
- only one version of a program can exist*
- packages are available immediately after install
- packages are imperative (you tell it what to do, it does that)
- files swapped in place (can lead to issues like kernel modules missing or Firefox not opening new tabs until restart)
*you might have
python3.8andpython3.9, but those must be created as different packages using different paths in/usrNixOS, Guix:
- declarative package management (basically config file and exactly these packages are installed)
- usr and parts of root read-only (afaik)
- packages symlinked to usr
- multiple versions of packages kept locally (though not all active necessarily)
- will keep using old package until restart/reboot, therefore not breaking on updates. New instances of a program can use the new package
- easy to roll back due to multiple versions kept
Immutable OS (haven’t seen one mentioned by OP, but it’s a category):
- often imperative package management
- using snapshots or multiple root partitions for easy rollbacks
- read-only root and usr
- packages might only be available after a reboot (depends on implementation and if system packages or something else like Flatpak, which doesn’t need a reboot, are used)
SerpentOS:
- experimental distro (ie stuff might change)
- imperative package manager
- packages installed to separate tree, but swapped live. Basically A/B root of an Immutable system that doesn’t require a reboot (according to the explaination in the latest blog post)
Not sure why ClearLinux is on that list of special distros and I don’t know half of the rest so yeah. Hope this explains some of it?
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