Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
Dont want to offend, but this is the most environmentally harmful OS on this planet probably. Except maybe BitcoinOS or something XD
How exactly? On idle Gentoo uses almost no resouces comapred to Windows 11 for example. If you’re on about needing to compile every package, then think how often is someone actually installing a new package and for how long is the processor working to do that? Also on a binary distro, then large servers are used to compile every last package, no matter how big or small, in that distro’s repos, then more machines are used to provide those binaries to the users.
The whole pipeline for Gentoo is much simpler, the end user’s system is a lot simpler and uses far less resources.
They are referring to the fact that Gentoo compiles everything from source rather than shipping binaries. This creates a lot of duplicated work between every user. But it’s not just for nothing. You get to actually know what code ends up in your binaries and they are optimized for your system. It is a trade off.
Do you, though? Do you check e-signatures and do you look at the every row of the code?
Well, you have the opportunity to. The fact that it is compiled on your system already gives you a lot of discretion. You can at least see what code is going into the compiler locally.
This is true. In theory its the best way, but ita crazy to think compiling Firefox can take like multiple hours of full computing power. And I like to update my software a lot.
Lets do a small comparison:
Linux power efficiency tier list
Desktops / WMs
Packaging
Distro type
Behavior
So uhm I guess I should switch to Debian 12, update once a week and go out on a hike or something.
It’s not duplicated work, because it’s optimized for your system and usage. If it was actually duplicated it wouldn’t be any better than Debian plus waiting 20 minutes every time you use apt.
Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.
I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.
These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.
Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.
Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.
Interesting, in my experience apps use either GTK or KDE and often KDE just uses GTK? I dont know how this works on GNOME, I guess it forces GTK somehow anyways.
Not technical enough to understand the rest haha.
Oh, I missed this response, sorry!
The example in question there is freeciv, which supports each of those frontends. Typically you’re going to pick the one that your DE uses, but because I maintain the package I had to go through and test it all when I updated it and converted it to the meson build recently. :)
https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/games-strategy/freeciv/freeciv-3.1.0_beta2.ebuild#L106-L140 should give you some indication of the complexity that I had to handle here. Not every app supports every toolkit, and this supports more than most!
Edit:
All that complexity means that if I set, for example,
USE='sdl qt6'the build will produce a client for each of those toolkits. Most users don’t have to worry because at least one will be inherited from their profile!It’s fluff these fays if you’re talking about optimizing for speed… unless you’re using very specific hardware for a specific purpose. But if you want to compile in support for something you want to be able to do that most people wouldn’t need, then yeah it’s a real advantage.
I am not sure anymore. There are two Appimages of Gimp at minimum. All are unofficial, but this one is incredibly fast.
On my regular Laptop the Lava render is TWICE as fast as the other versions of GIMP, Flatpak or even from the arch repos.
I heard this is because it uses Arch libraries instead of being compiled to run on this system. Not sure if this is true, but its crazy how fast it is. Poorly not maintained anymore, but now I wonder how fast a system could be if every app was compiled like that.
That’s interesting. I’ll have to check it out.
Might as well call linux the most polluting OS. It props up old inefficient systems with high TPW and takes longer to complete tasks. Whereas microsoft and apple makes sure their users are on the latest efficient hw. Maybe a bit offset by the ewaste but who cares, Apple and MS are out savingy the earth.
Oh I really hope this is satire.
Must be.
People just don’t care to put \s at the end anymore it seems. And when argued against they (we in this case) will be told that they don’t have any sense of humor.
I wont argue as such. Unless its a divisive topic where theres no place for ambiguity, /s just takes away from the sarcasm.
Yeah. It kinda does. Worst thing is, if you cleverly construct your joke some people will not get it and then some chocolate pudding will hit the air mover. But on the other hand \s somewhat ruins the good joke.
Thats part of the fun with edgy sarcasm.
Don’t know if its a joke but i saw a moronic comment and to highlight the ridiculousness decided to be a bigger moron.
What?
To show how moronic your claim was to term it as “most environmentally harmful OS” on one single factor(cpu time).
I think its better to have older machines that use more energy, than to have new ones that need resources, are worse repairable and all.
Could you explain “TPW” and “hw” in your comment? I read it as hardware, and having an OS force you to buy new (of their own) hardware is not sustainable at all. Its basically planned obsolescense.
Proove me wrong, but cant you securely boot a BIOS on any PC using their old TPM and a security key? I am in the procees of installing Heads on my T430, which is pretty old, but I think this will be very secure even without the new TPM standard.
I am in agreement with most if not all the above points. Didn’t agree with terming a distro the worst of anything based on a single metric.
~~ TPW~~ CPU TDP to use it as a rough efficiency metric. Probably not very accurate but roughly representative. HW meant hardware.
Maybe in many cases repurposing hardware makes sense but based on the source and cost of electricity, hw process generation it might not even be feasible to run compared to modern hw. Might be better to recycle them responsibly than keep those running.
In end I guess you realise there are many factors to consider to determine something good, bad.
Of course, hats why I said bad for the environment. If it was not rolling, maybe. But if you do updates at least twice a week it will consume lots or energy. If you use old hardware or not I think its independend from that.
Even assuming all other factors remain same sure it uses more power but by how much? Best case by how much do you expect the increase to be ? 5-10% of their daily electricity consumption ?
And when you consider the power source, hw efficiency and so on theres no way to assess what the environmental effect an OS has.
Also you are assuming behavior of the person remains the same when using a precompiled packages v. compiling their own. I’ve installed many sw just to try for a few minutes and remove just to try various options. If it takes hours to compile I’d be very picky on what I install.
Agree on the last. I also try a lot more packages. But its still rolling, in practice how many hours does your PC compile a week? Would be curious.
And I dont believe in the efficiency advantages or selfcompiled software vs. immense compiling power needed especially when rolling. On ESR maybe you got me. I really believe code thats made for one platform can be faster. But then you have MacOS which is slower than Arch on their own damn M1 hardware.