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Desulate
n00b
Joined: 22 May 2019
Posts: 24
Location: Canada
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 Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 1:50 pm Post subject: Distro advice |
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Hello, I have a few questions I'd like to ask before I commit to using Gentoo as a daily driver.
Basically I've been using arch for the last 2 years as my daily driver, it was my first linux distro. While I've enjoyed using arch its instability has become annoying over time, particularly when its caused by minor kernel upgrades.
After weeks of indecision I've boiled down the alternative distros that might suit me as a daily driver to either Gentoo or Fadora. I have gone though the base install of gentoo once already for fun.
I have a bias towards distros that allow you to build your system yourself but I have a few questions about Gentoo, Some of them are redundant but I'm going to ask them anyways.
1) Once you set the use flags for packages how often, if ever, do you really have to change them between package upgrades? I'm fine with the whole source based compilation time and the usual trouble shooting but wouldn't be to enthusiastic if I'm going to have to change use flags super frequently if the previous settings were already working for me before upgrades.
2) I've read that as long as your using the stable package repo you can leave your packages without upgrading them for some time on Gentoo unlike arch. How long in your opinion is it okay to leave non-security related upgrades before they would cause issues?
3) Exactly how stable is Gentoo? would I run into issues as frequently as I was with arch? how easy is it to find the known issues to fix after core upgrades on Gentoo?
4) My use case for my desktop will primarily be as a design workstation for graphic design as well as other multimedia production with some light development. Since its also my home system though I'll likely be using it for more pedestrian things as well.
5) I'm obviously coming from a distro which used systemd, how hard is it to adjust the Gentoo documentation to systemd from openRC. What other advantages dose openRC have besides "its not unixy enough and its one point of failure" that I might not know about.
6) I'm hoping that Gentoo is the type of distro when i can tinker with it but once I've have to set the way I want its suitable as a workstation that I can just leave alone until I have time to work on it later when I have time. 2 to 3 days a month of required tinkering as needed would be a acceptable amount of time to dedicate to my system given that I use it almost every day.
8) My machine has a NVME and some SSD's, how worried should I be about all the extra writes to them from compiling my system from source?
9) what are the other workstation use-cases that Gentoo has that I don't seem to know about? I already know about slots with portage.
10) Is there any hardware considerations for why I shouldn't use Gentoo, or which Gentoo can help improve my experience with?
System specs:
- Ryzen x1800
- x370 taichi
- 2x8 GB 3200MHz DDR4 corsair
- Vega 64
- Samsung 1 TB 960 Evo Nvme M.2.
- 2x Adata 120 GB SP580 SSD
- 4TB WD blue HHD
- LG CDrom drive
- eventually either a different work-related gpu or a capture card
Thank you for your time, Any input which could better inform me about the questions posed above would be appreciated. |
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duane
Apprentice
Joined: 03 Jun 2002
Posts: 193
Location: Oklahoma City
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 2:34 pm Post subject: |
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I don't feel qualified to answer most of your questions, but let me comment for a moment on stability/reliability.
I've used gentoo off and on for many years (let's say eight years total), though I am by no means an expert. I used arch on my laptop, local server and two other machines for nearly a year, and just finished converting them all back to gentoo. I think that overall, I prefer it.
However, in my experience, gentoo is not as reliable as arch, at least in the area of upgrades. I never had any major issues with upgrading arch, though there were a few times I had to recompile something and the man pages for one package were fubared for a while. In just the last week or so, I've had several aggravating issues with gentoo upgrades that required me to search out bug reports or ask for help on.
As an example, there's an issue with compiling rust on x86, coming from upstream. It's easy to fix, once you find the bug report, but it took me a while to think of that. The other problems I've had were similar.
I suspect that at least some of my trouble comes from doing things differently. I have a lot of possibly questionable use flags, to get the system I want, so if you don't want to tinker, you may not have many problems. But I can't imagine anyone not wanting to tinker when you have all of these options available.
I can't tell you how easy it is to run systemd on gentoo, but I find openrc just as easy to work with. I would miss journalctl if I hadn't installed lnav, which is just as helpful to me. However, I've used a simple window manager (openbox) for years, so systemd was never a requirement for me.
Edit: As for use flags, I've gone for years without changing them much, but new flags and new defaults come up occasionally in upgrades, so you may want to watch them.
Last edited by duane on Thu May 23, 2019 2:51 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Syl20
l33t
Joined: 04 Aug 2005
Posts: 619
Location: France
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 3:05 pm Post subject: Re: Distro advice |
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| Desulate wrote: | | After weeks of indecision I've boiled down the alternative distros that might suit me as a daily driver to either Gentoo or Fadora. |
Surprising. These two distros are so different.
1. That can vary slightly, depending on how you'll use your system and what you'll install.
Sometimes you'll want to add or remove some features, like a new codec, and sometimes portage will ask you to add or modify a USE flag for one package to update another one.
Sometimes you'll need to modify the USE flags several times a month, and sometimes you won't touch them for several years.
2. Are you lucky ? You can leave your system unupdated for years without having problems... Until someone/something tries to penetrate your system.
The best is to update at least once a month. The more you wait, the more the number of packages to update will grow. The risk is to have lots of configuration changes to make at the same time, or lots of updates blocks, that will need to be solved by hand.
3. I don't use Arch, so I can't compare Gentoo to it. But both are rolling releases. Sometimes you will have to solve some update problems too. Especially when you update some packages like the kernel, gcc, perl, and more generally when the major version of a package or a software set changes. In these cases, this forum is a very useful source of information.
4. Sorry, what is the question ?
5. As I _hate_ systemd, I prefer not answer the last question. But systemd should work identically everywhere.
Gentoo is about choice. The wiki gives details on both service managers and how to use them.
6. Generally, yes. As you don't have to stay in front of your screen when portage works, you can start the updates just before leaving your keyboard, and make some minor corrections or modifications after. And you can repeat this process if you need to compile a new kernel, or recompile some dependencies (emerge @preserved-rebuild). Most of the time, that takes less than ten minutes of your own time.
7. No, there isn't 7. Next.
8. With modern SSDs, this point is not really problematic anymore. But you can customize your partitionning to write some temporary files into a RAM FS if you want. That will preserve your hardware, and updating will be faster.
I have several Gentoo systems on SSDs for years, and, the more often, I don't use RAM FS at all. Until now, only one (very old) SSD died. And yes, I had backups.
9. Sorry, I think I didn't understand your question enough to give you a relevant answer. English isn't my main language.
10. As Gentoo can do almost all what you want it to do, there are no more hardware problems than with other distros. But... you are your system maker, and you will certainly have to search, to try, to fail, and to retry, to make each device work completely. And you'll be happy to have done that, once you succeeded. |
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Jaglover
Watchman
Joined: 29 May 2005
Posts: 8291
Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 4:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | how easy is it to find the known issues to fix after core upgrades on Gentoo? |
I have been running Gentoo for 15 years now, I cannot recall any serious case when something was broken _after_ upgrade. Since I have always run unstable branch then yes, there are occasional hickups _with_ upgrade. In other words, Gentoo runs great, stable or unstable. Upgrading it is a different issue, how much trouble you have depends on you. No specific computer knowledge is required to maintain Gentoo, but without common sense you will be lost.
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Please learn how to denote units correctly! |
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
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Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 5:42 pm Post subject: |
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Desulate,
USE flags control optional dependencies. Lets use alsa as an example. You build your install with USE=-alsa, so you don't have any sound card support.
All my servers are like that, its not an error to do it.
Later, you decide that you really want music on your desktop, so you set USE=alsa and rebuild everything with changed USE flags, then follow the alsa guide on the wiki.
I used this trivial contrived example for a reason. When you choose a profile during the install process, you get lots of good USE settings as a result.
e.g. the desktop profiles all include USE=alsa, so you don't have to. So choose a good profile at the outset.
If you really want control and hate any defaults at all, you can do that too.
OpenRC or systemd is an install choice. Choose the stage3 tarball that supports what you feel most comfortable with.
You can convecnt from one to the other. Have both installed, and choose at boot time. The choice is yours.
Gentoo tries to preserve an upgrade path for systems up to a year out of date. With mixed success.
If your run stable, don't go more than 6 months or it may get painful. It depends what changed while you were away.
With testing, once a month is about right. Testing is rough round the edges. openssl-1.1 is in testing but it doesn't work everywhere yet.
Users that like the haemorrhaging edge can have too. That's probably not you yet.
In a nutshell Gentoo provides the package manager and the ebuild repository. You use these tools to build your own distro.
Outside of the package manager and ebuild repository, everything is upstream.
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Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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389292
Guru
Joined: 26 Mar 2019
Posts: 504
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 6:46 pm Post subject: |
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| For more than a year on Arch I only had minor issues with packages, only once my keyboard stopped working on the latest kernel, the funny thing is that when I discovered it the newer kernel was already released and I upgraded to it, and the issue never came back. I never had any critical issues like not booting or X failure. So I guess it is very person/hardware/software specific. I had switched to Gentoo only recently, can't comment on it yet. |
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389292
Guru
Joined: 26 Mar 2019
Posts: 504
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: |
I used this trivial contrived example for a reason. When you choose a profile during the install process, you get lots of good USE settings as a result.
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Can I see somewhere the differences in profiles in more detailed form? What USE flags are chosen by default? Honestly this is not very intuitive during the first install. |
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1clue
Advocate
Joined: 05 Feb 2006
Posts: 2569
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 8:47 pm Post subject: |
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| etnull wrote: | | NeddySeagoon wrote: |
I used this trivial contrived example for a reason. When you choose a profile during the install process, you get lots of good USE settings as a result.
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Can I see somewhere the differences in profiles in more detailed form? What USE flags are chosen by default? Honestly this is not very intuitive during the first install. |
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Profile_(Portage)
You don't particularly need to know which USE flags your profile enables on your first go-around. You pick a profile which you think is closest to your intended environment, and pick that one. |
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Jaglover
Watchman
Joined: 29 May 2005
Posts: 8291
Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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NeddySeagoon
Administrator
Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54317
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Wed May 22, 2019 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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etnull,
Use eselect to choose a profile.
Run The USE flags from the selected profile and your fine tuning in make.conf will be shown in the output.
Rinse and repeat as many times as you like. No changed USE settings will take effect until you actually build packages, so lookiing is free.
Put the profile back as it was, or make a deliberate decision to change it.
The list of USE flags won't mean much. You will need to look up what they all mean.
Thats a Use Flag EDitor. It displays your global USE flags, where they are set, what they mean and optionally, lets you change them.
Like 1clue says, other than choosing a profile suited to your needs, leave USE flags alone until something has a missing or an extra feature.
You can always get from where you are now to where you think you want to be in Gentoo.
I can only think of one or two transitions that are so difficult that reinstalling is the only option. It might be true that reinstalling would be faster but its rarely the only way.
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Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail. |
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steve_v
Guru
Joined: 20 Jun 2004
Posts: 388
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Thu May 23, 2019 10:47 am Post subject: Re: Distro advice |
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| Desulate wrote: | | Basically I've been using arch for the last 2 years as my daily driver, it was my first linux distro. While I've enjoyed using arch its instability has become annoying over time, particularly when its caused by minor kernel upgrades. |
I ran Arch for some 5-years, and I can relate to your annoyance. Occasional borkage is the nature of bleeding-edge rolling releases. I also found the community somewhat caustic and elitist, but maybe that's just me.
As for your other questions, take with copious salt:
1) Not often at all unless you change your mind regularly, and emerge will alert you to new use flags if and when they appear.
2) I run updates about once a month on stable, or whenever I remember to. 99% of the breakage I have experienced has been self-inflicted, it's almost always packages I have installed from unstable, unofficial overlays or local ebuilds. I Haven't hit anything challenging to fix since my return to Gentoo, and I don't recall any major headaches from 10 years ago either.
3) Difficult to answer as I haven't used Arch in a while, but I'd say not as often as if you run stable, and easier to fix provided you read the news/forum/bugtracker.
5) Not very, and personal taste. I find OpenRC easier to understand and easier to hack on, and I don't like being forced into a single option for my userland plumbing. AFAIK Gentoo is the only distro that actually lets you choose your init without gratuitous hassle.
6) 2 to 3 days a month sounds like plenty to me.
8) I have an OCZ SSD from way back when they weren't yet identified as garbage, and it still runs fine. I have two other cheap SSDs running as a read cache on my fileserver, and they're fine too, 4 years on. I don't worry about write-lifetime, and I've never seen one fail.
That said, RAM is a much better place for a build directory. If you can spare ~8GB while the system updates, chuck /var/tmp/portage on tmpfs or zram.
9) Dunno, go play and find out?
10) Hardware support is a kernel thing, I can't really think of any special exceptions for Gentoo except that patching said kernel is a bit easier than most other distros.
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Desulate
n00b
Joined: 22 May 2019
Posts: 24
Location: Canada
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| Posted: Fri May 24, 2019 10:21 pm Post subject: |
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Follow up:
Thank your for answering my questions, I think I will give Gentoo an good try as a daily driver.
Top commenters I found most useful so far:
Steve_V, NeddySeagoon, Jaglover.
Answers to a few of your comments encase if your were wondering:
- How specifically did I find Arch annoying?
Specifically Arch is annoying because of minor breakage during minor kernel or DE updates. There was almost always a shifting minor issue during minor upgrades to fix. Sometimes I wouldn't mind, other times it would be seriously irritating. Most of the time by the time your tracked down the cause of it the package would have been fixed by the upstream developers with a minor update, only to be replaced with totally new issues to troubleshoot. The major problem with troubleshooting these issues was because they only occurred once, were so minor, or build specific that there wouldn't be any information available on the arch wiki or forum to fix them.
- Why was Fedora in the mix?
Well in all seriousness its not Ubuntu or Arch based and it gets packages fairly fast. Its also much stabler than arch and gets rapid dedicated development thanks to red hat. There is also alot of other benefits to using Fedora; so not to consider it would have been silly if your looking to use a Linux based system as a workstation. That being said I'm not sure I would have been satisfied with it after using Arch, but it would meet my basic needs for a stable workstation. That's why I listed it as a back up to try as a daily driver after Gentoo, Just encase your answers indicated a reason Gentoo wouldn't meet my needs. Plus I know a few people who swear by Fedora as a good daily distro.
- Why that particular question about use flags?
Like I said before, I did a basic base install of Gentoo with a customized kernel, but that is about it. I certainly didn't install any additional packages or have to update them. While there is alot of documentation about use flags themselves there isn't really any clear information anywhere which gives a good indication of how often you'll have to change them during updates; Leaving a potential users really just with a abstract idea of what it might be like as a daily distro. Besides compile times the idea of having to change use flags super frequently would be a totally acceptable reason to not choose Gentoo as a distro you intended to use as a workstation as it would be significant additional upkeep even compared to arch for using it as a daily driver if you have a significant amount of packages installed.
- Why the question(s) about reasonable time to dedicate or time allowed between updates?
Well the the follow up about why I found arch annoying pretty much sums it up. On the other hand having to wait 6 months to a year for updated packages wouldn't interest me at all. From your answers Gentoo seems to hit the sweet spot where I could get updates fairly frequently, every two week or so, but could leave it for a quarter to half a year without updates if I really wanted too without worrying that it would be completely unmanageable mess when I finally did. On arch I'd sooner save all my personal data and re-install then attempt to upgrade it after waiting 3 months between upgrades.
- Why the question about openRC? (no I wasn't trolling)
I was honestly just curious. If I had to estimate I'd guess that 99% of the discussions I've read about openRC is just linguistic vomit between systemd, openRC and BSD users that bring up the same old things but barely list any cool alternative befits to doing your own scripting in openRC. So I was wondering if there was any examples of neat things you could do to leverage the fact you can write scripts for openRC that couldn't be accomplished by systemd. I'm not some systemd "fan boy" its just arch uses systemd and its simple to use so I'm already familiar with it. Runit also sounds neat for what its worth.
Thank you again for the time you spent answering my questions. |
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steve_v
Guru
Joined: 20 Jun 2004
Posts: 388
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Sat May 25, 2019 12:54 am Post subject: |
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| Desulate wrote: | | Thank your for answering my questions, I think I will give Gentoo an good try as a daily driver. |
Then this is where I wish you luck, and assure you that we will be here to help if you run into any snags. 
| Desulate wrote: | | Specifically Arch is annoying because of minor breakage during minor kernel or DE updates. There was almost always a shifting minor issue during minor upgrades to fix. |
Honestly, you'll probably have similar issues to fix on Gentoo unstable. That's why we have a stable branch, and I've found it to be a lot more true to it's name than the Arch equivalent.
| Desulate wrote: | | On arch I'd sooner save all my personal data and re-install then attempt to upgrade it after waiting 3 months between upgrades. |
I ran into the same, and more than once found myself with totally broken binary linking where core software simply wouldn't run - including the package manager.
The Arch attitude seems to be "Just update every week" (often with a dose of "Didn't update like we said? Oh well, you're screwed."), whereas Gentoo provides tools specifically for dealing with such rare and unpleasant situations. Figuring out how to use those tools takes a while, but once you do pretty much any breakage is quite fixable.
| Desulate wrote: | | If I had to estimate I'd guess that 99% of the discussions I've read about openRC is just linguistic vomit between systemd, openRC and BSD users |
Indeed. The technical issues have been thrashed to death years ago, and anyone with strong opinions either way is far too entrenched to do anything but argue in ever-contracting circles. Personally, I don't care what init system someone wants to run, I just want the freedom to choose for myself.
Gentoo allows me to do just that, so back to Gentoo I came when Debian locked us into systemd. I'll probably have a good play with runit and S6 at some point too, they look pretty cool.
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Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times is Official GNOME Policy. |
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NeddySeagoon
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Joined: 05 Jul 2003
Posts: 54317
Location: 56N 3W
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| Posted: Sat May 25, 2019 9:42 am Post subject: |
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Desulate,
A new all testing Gentoo install will be a challenge right now.
The stable version of openssl and the testing version of openssl are not binary compatible and not everything that uses openssl works with the testing version.
As you can only have one version of openssl installed at a time, some packages will not build against the new openssl.
This is an unusually large breakage for testing.
Start with stable.
| steve_v wrote: | | Then this is where I wish you luck, and assure you that we will be here to help if you run into any snags. :) |
That should probably be when, not if. :)
Every Gentoo install is different. We all know the tools but we will never know your install. When you run into problems, we will help you understand and apply the tools to fix it.
As your install is unique, you need to make the decisions to choose among the options to get to where you want to be. We can help by pointing out the options but the final decision will be yours.
Actually, that's not quite true. You can do one thing, then change your mind. Its only CPU time.
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Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
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steve_v
Guru
Joined: 20 Jun 2004
Posts: 388
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Sat May 25, 2019 9:54 am Post subject: |
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| NeddySeagoon wrote: | | Start with stable |
This^.
| NeddySeagoon wrote: | | That should probably be when, not if. |
Yeah, it probably should. Then again, I managed to install a lightly bastardised stable without any problems I couldn't solve myself, and that after a 10 year holiday in binary-land.
My memory isn't all that, so it must have been smooth sailing this time, right? 
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