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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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 Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 8:25 am Post subject: |
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| flexibeast wrote: |
Even so, there's not even the possibility of improvement if people don't provide specific feedback. Again: i understand that creating/improving documentation is often a low priority for a number of people, and that requests can feel like they're effectively falling on deaf ears. But in the case of Gentoo, i can say that there are a number of us actively working on trying to improve things; and in my own particular case, one of the main reasons i track the forums is to keep an eye out for indications of a need for doc creation/improvement.
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Well, here is some specific feedback...
In the installation handbook, the section "Choosing the right profile" [1] says:
"Not only does it specify default values for USE, CFLAGS, and other important variables, it also locks the system to a certain range of package versions. "
But USE, CFLAGS, etc., have not been mentioned (AFAICS) at this point, so this is a head-scratcher. You have to read ahead a bit to find what USE means, and where CFLAGS are applied. The manual also gives the impression -- although it doesn't says so in so many words -- that profiles have a measure of permanence. I certainly read this section to mean that if I installed multiple systems, with the same profile, that their basic configuration would be the same. But, in fact, this turned out not to be the case, as I've raised elsewhere. The purpose of a profile, and how it interacts with USE settings, is not clear at this point -- and can't be, since USE settings have not been explained.
The, a little later, it talk about "Adding a binary host".
"In many cases, adding a binary package host will greatly decrease the mean time to package installation and adds much benefit when running Gentoo on older, slower, or low power systems."
What it doesn't say -- and again, will be obvious to Gentoo experts, but wasn't to me -- is that you can only take advantage of the binary host with particular kinds of configuration, and that the USE flags have an effect here.
So, when we do get to USE flags, the documentation does state what these are, and why you might want to change them. However, for a new-ish user, what's missing here is any discussion of the implications of changing them. I thought I could hack on these settings freely, and there would be no down-side to doing so. The interaction between USE flags, profile settings, and binary hosting are not clear. At least, not clear to me. Frankly, these things are still not entirely clear to me.
Don't get me wrong: the Gentoo installation manual is among the best I've ever read in this area. In fact, the documentation as a whole is pretty good. What's lacking, for me, is fundamental, architectural information. Gentoo works in a particular way. It's different to Fedora and what-not. I think one needs to understand how Portage works, how USE flags, profiles, etc., interact before planning an installation. So the installation guide could say: "Here's a step-by-step process that will get you to a working point if you have modern hardware, you're setting up only one installation, and you're happy with the maintainers' defaults for most things." But: "If you have specific requirements, you're planning multiple installations, you have hardware constraints, here's a heap of stuff you need to read before you even start...."
The installation manual does not (AFAIKS) even allude to the 'rolling release' nature of Gentoo. Does this matter at installation time? I think it does, because it has implications for how you plan the installation. There are going to be frequent updates, many of which will require compiling. There are ways to reduce the amount of compilation, but they have implications.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that the documentation is written for people who don't need documentation: I imagine that if you've been fiddling with Gentoo for ten years, all the stuff I'm confused about is just too obvious even to mention. In fact, I've even had comments to that effect from other people in this forum -- "we don't document this because it's obvious". Wasn't obvious to me, though.
There's a lot more I could say, if anybody wanted to listen 
BR, Lars.
[1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Choosing_the_right_profile |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 8:42 am Post subject: |
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| GDH-gentoo wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: | | It's plausible (increasingly plausible) that Gentoo isn't what I need. |
I'm afraid that if Gentoo isn't, nothing else will be  Constraint a) already rules Linux from Scratch (LFS) out. |
It turns out that MX Linux comes pretty close. It's pretty light to start with, particularly the Xfce4 variant, and it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level.
In practice, to run Gentoo on my old laptops, I have to use pre-compiled binary versions of everything, so much of the benefit of Gentoo is inaccessible to me anyway. So I have to question whether I want the pain of maintaining it, when I'm not getting all that much of the benefit.
I'm toying with the idea of using a desktop system (still old, but doesn't overheat) to compile Gentoo stuff for my laptops, but this is turning out to be a bigger pain in the rear end than I expected.
BR, Lars. |
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finoderi
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Joined: 29 Oct 2021
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:12 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | ...it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level. |
It has GUI utilities for everything, so yeah. As for systemd it's deactivated and neutered, but still there 'for compatibility with Debian packages'.
But there are a lot of lightweight solutions for old laptops. Gentoo is just one of them. |
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:35 am Post subject: |
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| finoderi wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: | | ...it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level. |
As for systemd it's deactivated and neutered, but still there 'for compatibility with Debian packages'.
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That's true for Gentoo as well: we're still stuck with systemd-udevd, and there are assorted systemd unit files lurking around. I'm not bothered about this, on either platform, but I know it irritates some people.
What's potentially a problem with MX -- and definitely not a problem with Gentoo -- is that MX is based on the Debian stable branch, so a lot of the packages are quite old. So I've found myself building stuff from source just to get later versions. What goes around, comes around, I guess.
The third-best platform I've found for my old laptops is Fedora's XFce variant. But this requires even more post-installation work to trim it down to a usable configuration.
I didn't have much success with Devuan, Calculate, Artix, Void, or Arch; but it's plausible that I didn't try hard enough. Gentoo works best, but the downsides are considerable, in my environment.
BR, Lars. |
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finoderi
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 10:21 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | That's true for Gentoo as well: we're still stuck with systemd-udevd, and there are assorted systemd unit files lurking around. |
Not to that extent, but yes, systemd is everywhere now. |
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flexibeast
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Joined: 04 Apr 2022
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Location: Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 11:04 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | Well, here is some specific feedback.... |
Thanks for sharing! immolo and i have actually been reviewing the contents of Handbook - but neither of us are Gentoo devs, so what we're doing is adding comments and suggestions on the Discussion/Talk page for each Handbook page. And csfore, who is a Gentoo dev and thus has permissions to make Handbook changes, has been gradually working through those comments and suggestions.
Similarly, you could add your comments to the relevant Talk page, https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook_Talk:AMD64/Installation/Base - all you need to do is create a wiki account.
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flexibeast
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 11:10 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I didn't have much success with Devuan, Calculate, Artix, Void, or Arch |
As a former Void user, who would happily go back to Void if i had to use a binary distro, i'm interested to know what issues you faced with it?
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 1:15 pm Post subject: |
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| flexibeast wrote: |
As a former Void user, who would happily go back to Void if i had to use a binary distro, i'm interested to know what issues you faced with it? |
I just had a lot of fussy problems setting it up. I couldn't get X to work using 'startx', for example, because it turns out there is no default xinitrc. But it was not obvious why it wouldn't work -- no error messages. It's not difficult to fix, knowing the cause of the problem, and perhaps this is documented somewhere. For reasons unclear to me, the .cache directory in $HOME ended up owned by , so many applications failed in bizarre ways.
I never managed to get elogind working, so I was unable to shut down or suspend from an X session. Probably this was something to do with DBus, which I'm also not sure I had working properly. There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of documentation about any of these topics.
If I'd really, really wanted to get Void working, I could probably have overcome these problems. What put me off was how many there were, and how odd they seemed.
On the plus side, the Void version of Firefox has native ALSA support (or carefully hides the fact, if it does not), and I didn't find myself forced to install Pulse or Pipewire.
In the end, though, Void proudly proclaims that it "is developed in the spare time of a handful of developers, and is generally considered stable enough for daily use. We do this for fun and hope that our work will be useful to others." I'm really looking for a Linux I can grow old with, so I'm a bit uncertain about Void's future.
Still, perhaps I did not give it enough of a chance :/
BR, Lars. |
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flexibeast
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Location: Naarm/Melbourne, Australia
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| Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2024 1:35 am Post subject: |
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@lars_the_bear:
Hmm. Well, vanilla Void - as distinct from the Xfce-based spin; there used to be other spins available as well - is indeed pretty minimal, and is not something i'd suggest to someone without a knowledge of the common 'plumbing' of Linux systems. It essentially provides a base on which one can build a system suitable to one's needs, which is why i liked it (and also why i've ended up on Gentoo). Presumably you didn't use the Xfce spin?
i'm also interested to know to what extent you followed the Void Linux Handbook (which i spent some time working on)? For example, in this section of the Xorg page, it says:
| Quote: | | The xinit package provides the startx(1) script as a frontend to xinit(1), which can be used to start X sessions from the console. For example, to start i3(1), edit ~/.xinitrc to contain exec /bin/i3 on the last line. |
i.e. one needs to edit ~/.xinitrc to start the DE/WM of your choice; a default xinitrc can't be provided on a system where there's no DE/WM installed by default.
That section also links to the "D-Bus" section of the "Session management" page, although i admit it's sparse - more on D-Bus below. In general, there was a policy of deliberately not going too deeply into non-Void-specific details, as described on the "About this Handbook" page:
| Quote: | | This handbook is not an extensive guide on how to use and configure common Linux software. The purpose of this document is to explain how to install, configure, and maintain Void Linux systems, and to highlight the differences between common Linux distributions and Void. |
(There was previously a wiki, but that was dropped because people kept on adding incorrect information to it in a way the Void team couldn't manage.)
Re. D-Bus in particular, it was during my time with Void that i came to feel there was a significant lack of understanding of its purpose and the critical details of how it worked, which is how i came to write this guide. (It doesn't help that tribalist anti-systemd people have an allergic reaction to things with 'd' in their name; i'll never get tired of noting how i once encountered someone who believed that anything ending in '-d' was a systemd thing.  )
| lars_the_bear wrote: | | I'm really looking for a Linux I can grow old with, so I'm a bit uncertain about Void's future. |
Well, Void has weathered a few storms, and is still around. But that said, Void isn't trying to win market share: a phrase that was used was "Void is for people who want what Void offers". For me, that was a minimal distro, without systemd, on which i could build a setup customised to my own needs. From your posts on these forums, i get the impression that such a distro is not for you - what you need is a distro that's usable for you "out of the box", which you can customise.
The fundamental thing to remember is: No distro is going to immediately and perfectly meet all your needs and wants. Every distro has its strong points and weak points. In a practical sense, you won't find anything that 100% meets every need and want you have. What you need to do is to prioritise those needs and wants: what things are absolutely essential, what things can you bend a bit on, which things are merely "nice to have"? Where does "a distro I can grow old with" fit in that categorisation? What things are you willing to put time into learning about in detail, and which things do you want to not have to care about? There are always going to be tradeoffs.
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lars_the_bear
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| Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2024 6:05 pm Post subject: |
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| flexibeast wrote: |
i'm also interested to know to what extent you followed the Void Linux Handbook (which i spent some time working on)? For example, in this section of the Xorg page, it says:
| Quote: | | The xinit package provides the startx(1) script as a frontend to xinit(1), which can be used to start X sessions from the console. For example, to start i3(1), edit ~/.xinitrc to contain exec /bin/i3 on the last line. |
i.e. one needs to edit ~/.xinitrc to start the DE/WM of your choice; a default xinitrc can't be provided on a system where there's no DE/WM installed by default.
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Well, I did read the section you mentioned, but I guess I just made incorrect assumptions. There are 'xorg' and 'xorg-minimal' packages, and I kind-of assumed that 'xorg' was non-minimal enough at least to start an X session of some kind, even a broken one.
IIRC what I got when I did `emerge xorg-server` on Gentoo was a default xinitrc that tried to start TWM. This wasn't installed, but at least I got an error message to that effect. I knew what to do next. With the Void 'xorg' package startx didn't even get me an error messasge -- the server started and shut down immediately. This isn't the fault of Void, I guess -- it just wasn't the behaviour I have come to expect.
It seems right to me, in principle, that a X server installation shouldn't have a dependency on a specific window manager. I like the idea that a 'minimal' install would actually be minimal. But I thought I'd get that with 'xorg-minimal', not with 'xorg'.
I agree, though, that I didn't give Void much of a chance. I have it set up with Xfce4 now, so I can play with it some more.
I guess this is way off-topic for a Gentoo forum, but it is your impression that Void has a future? I do understand that you probably don't have a crystal ball, of course.
BR, Lars. |
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