How do you avoid bloat and problematic components in Gentoo?

danialsmith49 · n00b Joined: 06 Mar 2018 Posts: 1

[Moderator note: as observed by fedeliallalinea, this post is cross-posted to linuxquestions.org. It is under observation as to whether this is a legitimate cross-post or if this is a spammer borrowing text from elsewhere. -Hu]

There was a hidden spam-link, now removed. -- Akkara

Let's share our experiences.

systemd and PulseAudio often froze the shutdown process for a while. I replaced systemd with OpenRC. Somehow, GNOME crashed very often in the presence of some KDE programs. Thus, I ditched GNOME.

It turns out that RedHat has been forcing distributions to use their softwares long before the softwares became stable. Two (former) RedHat employees caught my attention. Lennart Poettering forced Fedora and other distros to use PulseAudio and systemd before they became stable. systemd developers forced distributions to use systemd by forcing udev to depend on systemd. udev was used by many distributions. Later, udev was eaten by systemd. To solve this issue I have done RnD in (URL removed) but didn't get the answer. Havoc Pennington founded freedesktop and forced major desktop environments and web browsers to use dbus via freedesktop. Havoc Pennington pushed a lot of things through freedesktop. Linus Torvalds had to stop dbus developers from shoving kdbus into linux kernel a few years ago. If dbus was replaced by kdbus, a lot of programs could break on *BSD.

I realized that ALSA + dmix would be just fine because I don't use Bluetooth audio(which still doesn't work reliably on Linux. Thanks to bluez) or have a second sound card. I don't really use pulseaudio per-application volume, either. Thus, I plan to remove PulseAudio by moving to Gentoo Linux in the near future. I'll be able to reduce CPU usage and latency and remove an extra layer between ALSA and user applications. I have yet to decide how problematic PulseAudio is at this point, though. If I really wanted or needed a sound server in the future, I might try combining ALSA and JACK. Since Gentoo requires a lot of compilation, I will buy a new CPU.

I used NetworkManager without much thought when I used GNOME, but after replacing NetworkManger with OpenRC's network management capability, I gained more flexibility and more network configuration options. NetworkManager was difficult to handle directly via command line or text file configurations.

I'm not sure if I want to avoid dbus at all costs because gtk+3, many web browsers except qupzilla and surf, and many other graphics programs depend on dbus directly or indirectly. But, I can try to minimize dbus footprint as much as possible in Gentoo by USE flags. I could use qupzilla and surf if I wanted to avoid dbus in web browser, but qupzilla still pulls a lot of dependencies via qt5-base and ffmpeg. Plus, many other programs still require dbus. Thus, chrome or firefox with dbus seems to be a lesser poison than qt5-base or webkitgtk.

POSIX_ME_HARDER · n00b Joined: 30 Aug 2015 Posts: 27

mv's overlay offers GTK+3 without dbus.

As someone who uses mdev and avoids dbus, pulseaudio, and co, but also wants a keyboard driven browser, I am struggling as well.

Dr.Willy · Guru Joined: 15 Jul 2007 Posts: 547 Location: NRW, Germany

For gtk3 and qt5 it seem to be the accessibility flags that pull in the dbus bloat.
For some reason accessibility seems to be required for some packages.

Marcih · Apprentice Joined: 19 Feb 2018 Posts: 213

1clue · Advocate Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 2569

We need a USE=-poettering flag. AFAIK there's absolutely nothing he has collaborated on which turned out to be beneficial to Linux.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Wed Mar 07, 2018 10:09 pm Post subject:

1clue,

I've got a profile like that. :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

CasperVector · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2012 Posts: 156

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Why use ifplugd? dhcpcd does everything better.

Marcih · Apprentice Joined: 19 Feb 2018 Posts: 213

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Zucca · Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2018 10:25 pm Post subject:

I have to defend PulseAudio a bit here: It really makes audio things pretty much plug and play, however, with an overhead. This is why I avoid it on laptops and other mobile devices (Nokia N900 has/has PA, which drained its battery).

So for general desktop use PA is "fine".

Still I had some hopes for KLANG... I think it's a dead project by now. :(
_________________
..: Zucca :..

CasperVector · Apprentice Joined: 03 Apr 2012 Posts: 156

Morality124 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Feb 2018 Posts: 102

Morality124 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Feb 2018 Posts: 102

Zucca · Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:18 am Post subject:

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2018 9:56 am Post subject:

Morality124,

I'm using openrc-0.17 with the default/linux/amd64/17.0/no-multilib (stable) * profile with that set up.
I've had to create an overlay, so I can add USE=olde-gentoo to a number of ebuilds to get them to swerve a few of the banned packages.

I suppose I should publish the overlay.
Its unlikely I could push the ebuild patches into the gentoo repo, even if olde-gentoo was p.masked.
Then we would need static profiles nh the whole thing grows arms and legs

Hmm ... the overlay could provide profiles.

audiodef · Posted: Tue Mar 20, 2018 1:20 pm Post subject: