this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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Gentoo is.. well I wouldn't exactly call it nice, but neat? :)
I've played around with it a bunch but grew impatient with it. The compile times was terrible for me back then.
Gentoo and Arch do have their niche though. Takes a bit longer to set up but they're quite customized to your liking when you're done.
The compile times are quite OK on relatively modern hardware. I've been using a Ryzen 1700X up to last week, and except for WebKit I had no reason to complain. On my slightly dated Haswell laptop (from 2016) they are now starting to get on my nerves, but it's still tolerable.
The only exception is WebKit, which takes forever to compile and which also tends to get installed multiple times, in slightly different versions (one version for Evolution, one for Liferea, one for Epiphany - and yes, those 3 programs all belong to the Gnome desktop). I've now set up ccache just for WebKit, but haven't had to install a WebKit update since, so I have no idea how much the ccache helps...
Sorry for going on a tangent here. Back on topic: The setup for Gentoo takes as long as you are willing to invest time into it... The more time you invest, the more customized the system gets.
I'm currently running Sway window manager, with a ton of other not-so-usual tools (some of which I wrote myself, like my status bar application), and I'm really happy with how my PC currently feels. My desktop looks like it just escaped the early 1990s, but it's so fast and just doesn't get in the way ever...
I can see the charm in that tbh.
I like the idea of Gentoo, it's a pretty cool concept. Just a time consuming one as well. :) I remember my problem with it was that I couldn't really decide how I wanted my system to end up while I was setting it up.. which kind of defeats the purpose a bit I felt.
Yeah, and most of the customization you can do on any other distribution too. The main advantage of Gentoo is that it's Rolling Release, so there won't be any distribution upgrades breaking the cusotmizations.
The same is true for Debian Testing or Arch too, though.
Or openSUSE Tumbleweed :)
Is Debian Testing actually rolling I thought they froze it before new stable releasea?
Yeah, it's not fully "rolling", as new (non-critical) updates can get delayed for quite some time while packages are getting stabilized for a Stable release.
It's strange really. I've used Ubuntu on and off since.. 8.4 or something like that but I've never tried Debian. Don't even know why.
I've used Debian Stable some years ago at University on "my" office PC. For a work PC it was the perfect distribution. The "stable" in the name is well deserved. It's so stable, it's a bit boring, to be honest. However, that's just what one needs at work. The PC has to run (a crash equals lost work), and maintenance burden needs to be low.
Isn't it kind of strange that a lot of us equal stable with boring? I know I do at times as well.
There's something satisfying with stuff breaking and managing to fix them I suppose