Where do you go, when even Gentoo isn't enough?

[NeddySeagoon]

Team,

Don't take my post too literally. I've been stuck on Android since early July so was using the xorg-server example from memory.

The general ponit is still valid, that is, eburlds as written and suppored by the ebuild devs do not cater for all possibilities.
I've had to remove the REQUIREDUSE statement from several to make my system work the way I want it to.

It's one trivial example of your Gentoo, your way.
There are many others.
The idea is that when an ebuild doesn't do what you want, use it as a starting point to try to get what you want.
That may not be possible but you need to try.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[Tom_]

My computer is from 2011 (Intel i5 2500k + 20GB of memory) and I wondered multiple times whether or not there was a more suitable distribution out there.

For the moment, I've stick to Gentoo because it is the most flexible distribution I found and I'm empowered to choose whether or not I want to compromise on something or not. For me, this is what matters.

For ie, here are some of my personal choices :

- I use firefox-bin instead of firefox,
- I got rid of Google Chrome, Chromium and qtwebengine,
- I use the Gentoo official binhost for a large number of packages,
- I only have one version of gcc, llvm or clang,
- I use a LTS kernel (5.4.x) to limit maintenance time,
- I don't use sytemd or pulseaudio.

I also tried to use the Nix package manager (to get binary packages) in parallel of Portage. It was pretty nice but the Gentoo official binhost was good enough I stopped using it.

I'm wondering about using gcc and other packages from the Gentoo binhost too.

Thomas

[GreenNeonWhale]

lars_the_bear,

I have a few thoughts, that might help:

- I read earlier in this thread your mention of thrashing. If you're still using a spinning rust drive, perhaps upgrading your laptop/s to SSD/s might be a good idea? If I'm stating the obvious to you, then please forgive me. I just did that upgrade myself recently, on an older laptop I'm setting up. It made a substantial improvement in its performance. I've been able to acquire used SSDs on eBay for quite reasonable prices. That is where I got the SSD that's in my laptop now. When I checked the usage percentage on installation, it was at 15%. After doing a bunch of portage and installs, its still at 15%. Its an old 128GB unit.

- You mentioned being concerned about your data be accidentally overwritten. A specific series of SSDs that might be worthy of consideration are Kanguru's external USB SSDs with a physical write protect switch. You can flip the switch, and the external drive itself enforces Read-Only. Perhaps this would be of use to you in protecting your data? They're also hardened against BadUSB style attacks. They offer an external one that takes NVMe drives. If you call them and ask, which I've done, they're willing to sell just the enclosure, which is MUCH cheaper than the units with their included drive, less than $50 all in, if memory serves. It is by phone order only. Personally, I did this, and separately bought a used NVMe SSD on eBay for a quite reasonable price. This got me a good working unit, for a chunk less, and its quite fast. I'm just a customer of theirs, and am NOT receiving any compensation whatsoever for the recommendation. Here's a link to that one:
https://www.kanguru.com/products/kanguru-ultralock-usb-c-m-2-nvme-external-solid-state-drive

- I concur with NeddySeagoon, that it might be a good idea to consider tracking down some reasonably priced time on a VPS somewhere. Then you could compile on some 100+ core monster, and avoid having to own or maintain it.

As an aside, I agree with your distaste for prematurely disposing of functional, usable computers. Its so wasteful.

I hope all that was of some help.

In any event, best of luck with your computing endeavors. I hope you're able to work out a good solution.

[jeffss]

this is something that might interest you and it is said that it can work on top of any OS, https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Substitutes.html, maybe you could find some package derivations with build configurations suitable for you

[sMueggli]