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

  • nyan@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    3 months ago

    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.

        • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
          0·
          3 months ago

          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)

          • exu@feditown.comEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            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 python3.8 and python3.9, but those must be created as different packages using different paths in /usr

            NixOS, 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?