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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The main benefit to using Gentoo is having complete control over your system. I've been a Gentoo user for nearly 6 years so the feeling of accomplishment has worn off long ago and now I feel like I'm using any distro which is a good thing. use flags come in handy when you want to install a desktop but none of the extra crap that's bundled with it or an application that has a feature that's disabled by default that you want to enable. Most packages take less than a minute to compile and on the stable branch, most of the big stuff only needs to update once in a while. From an outsider it sounds tryhardy to use Gentoo but in reality I'm using Firefox or playing a game while something compiles in the background which isn't as often as you think. I update once a week and it's usually 4 packages that take a minute to compile.
Haha, ran gentoo for about a decade.
At some point breaking your system blocks your actual work and you get lazy, hence my return to debian and freebsd.
But when you're young and have the energy it's great.
Also, the optimizations never helped that much, maybe 2-3% or so usually, which considering the raw firepower a decent workstation has now just seems pointless, compiling xorg or kde aren't going to move that needle.
I wonder about the optimizations now. When I used gentoo it was an era where binaries were compiled for lowest common denominator targets. i386, ppc etc. That is they used no optimized instructions at all. It was the era where MMX and SSE were becoming a thing and there were genuine optimizations you were likely missing out on. So compiling your own stuff actually did show varying levels of improvement.
These days I'm pretty sure most binaries are detecting cpu flags and flipping on extra functionality when detected so the optimizations are less pronounced than they were.
But, I'd be interested to know if I've got that wrong. These days, I've gotten older and I don't have time to spend a weekend fixing my system when it goes wrong, as such I'm using pre-compiled distros. Often when they break I'll fall back to my dual boot windows until I have a block of time to fix it. How did I have so much spare time back then?