Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 16, 2012 18:06 UTC (Mon) by nikarul (subscriber, #4462)
In reply to: Left by Rawhide by marduk
Parent article: Left by Rawhide

I'll second this recommendation. I've been running Gentoo much like our editor has been running Rawhide these past few years. Every once in awhile things break, sometimes spectacularly, and it definitely keeps your system diagnosis skills sharp. But for the most part, it works very well and gives you a more control over what's going onto your system.

I will add a couple caveats. Obviously this requires a system which good CPU and memory resources for the amount of package building you do. And I do maintain a rather large RAM drive for building all but the largest packages (I'm looking at you, Libre Office). I've had more than one hard drive fall in the past to the onslaught that is 'emerge -uDv world'.

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Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 16, 2012 21:50 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (3 responses)

Every once in awhile things break, sometimes spectacularly, and it definitely keeps your system diagnosis skills sharp. But for the most part, it works very well and gives you a more control over what's going onto your system.

I haven't used a traditional Linux distribution in over 10 years; I've been using Linux from Scratch followed by Gentoo. It's difficult for me to remember what it's like not to have that control.

Do regular distributions break less frequently than Gentoo or do they just break in different ways?

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 17, 2012 1:45 UTC (Tue) by kenmoffat (guest, #4807) [Link]

Hmm, as a Linux from Scratch (and Beyond-*) user and editor, I've often broken my builds when updating. Occasionally,I even have to use multiple-version workarounds (currently, older ffmpeg for transcode, which we've now dropped, and gst-ffmpeg [ yes, I know that gst-ffmpeg devs dislike using system ffmpeg, but their version of ffmpeg was *so* old last time I looked).

I've also seen problems in specific packages (e.g. abiword with some past versions of libxml2). So, I expect that from time to time there will be *some* breakage on my desktop. But, that's "my system, my rules, my breakage."

I don't expect my changes in the books to break functionality - if they do, I try to fix the problem. I had assumed that all distros took a similar "we don't deliberately break it, but if it's broken we will try to fix it" attitude. Sounds as if I'm too much of an optimist.

ĸen

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 17, 2012 13:25 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I run Gentoo on my android tablet (arm) in a chroot. I even compiled libreoffice. Together with a keyboard-case it makes a fine laptop.

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 17, 2012 15:11 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> It's difficult for me to remember what it's like not to have that control

It feels exactly the same.

Left by Rawhide

Posted Jul 17, 2012 10:29 UTC (Tue) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

> Obviously this requires a system which good CPU and memory resources for the amount of package building you do.

I run Gentoo on my atom boxes (netbook, nettop). It works fine. (Anecdotally, better [faster/cooler] than prebuilt distros, perhaps due to -Os -march=atom Could be confirmation bias, though). Just don't expect huge things (kernel, mozilla, LibreOffice) to compile instantly.