Installing Minimal Gentoo with Plasma Desktop and Some Apps

[manmath]

Dear members, I've been using Debian for over 20 years. I know my way around it. But now I'm so interested in installing Gentoo as Debian is not modular enough for me. Or to put it in a different way I can't tame Debian to my liking. For example, I don't have any AMD hardware but still I can't uninstall "xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu" because if I do it will also purge "sddm" and "xserver-xorg". The same is true for many packages that I believe should not have been installed on my system but were installed in a "one-size-fits-all" philosophy. I hope Gentoo USE flags will come in handy (it's so enticing!).

My Would-be Gentoo System (Everything to be compiled natively irrespective of the time it takes)
Bootloader: LiLo
Init: OpenRC
Desktop: KDE Plasma (without qtwebengine, akonadi, kdekonnect)
Applications: konsole, okular, gwenview, spectacle, kdenlive, calligra (sheets, stage and word), texlive with kile, kfind, kcalc, kwrite, ark, ffmpeg, imagemagick, audacity, gimp, firefox, simplescreenrecorder, vlc, scribus, lynx, aria2, wget, cpdf, and moc with ffmpeg plugin.
Locale/format: en_US UTF.8
Security/Troubleshooting: No Security at all (no SELinux, Apparmor, etc), no debugging features, no server-related stuff
No bluetooth
Ethernet: Use to connect to a NAS
WiFi: Always on and keeps switching to different WPA2 access points depending on the signal strength
Webcam and microphone always in use

My goal is to drop every unnecessary bit possible (for example, the liquorix kernel I've compiled and using now is just 7MB in size, however, I can't do that for other packages cos there's no such USE flag thing in Debian). So, to be specific, I want you to share with me a global USE flag config file and package specific USE flag config files. I won't mind how much time it takes, I want to compile every bit. Here under is some info that might help you help me. I know it's a tall order, but very deeply appreciate if you share the config files.

My system details:
Gigabyte H61-DS2 Motherboard
i5 3330 Processor[/code]
16GB 1600MHz memory in dual channel
480GB Crucial SSD

manmath@debian:~$ lsusb
Bus 002 Device 004: ID 046d:c018 Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 046d:0825 Logitech, Inc. Webcam C270
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 148f:7601 Ralink Technology, Corp. MT7601U Wireless Adapter
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
manmath@debian:~$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation H61 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port Desktop SATA AHCI Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 05)

[alamahant]

Welcome to Gentoo Forums!

Have you ever used Gentoo?
There is a hierarchy of USE flags

[manmath]

[pietinger]

manmath,

Welcome to Gentoo Forums !

I like your goal to have a minimal system - I have it also because of security reasons.

First of all, you will need this use-flag:

[alamahant]

[manmath]

Mine is BIOS setup, not UEFI. But yeah I'm ok with Grub2. I hope plasm-nm needs networkmanager. Maybe it's possible to replace that with connman. As for compiling kernel, I always go with localmodconfig following by menuconfig to do some further reduction. On top of my mind, these are my considerations:

posix message queues: no
enable process_vm_read: no
uselib syscall: no
auditing support: no
bsd process counting: no
export task process statistics: no
enable mps table: no
multi-core scheduler support: no
reroute for broken boot: no
ioperm and iopl: no
numa memory allocation: no
check for low memory correction: no
intel memory protection keys: no
kernel crash dumps: no
build a relocatable kernel: no
number of loop devices: 0
asynchronous scsi scanning: yes
number of graphics cards: 1

[pietinger]

[manmath]

[pietinger]

[manmath]

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

Welcome to Gentoo. As you are new to Gentoo 'go with the flow' to start with to learn how it works.
The plasma profile will likely get you a lot of junk on your banned list but tolerate it to start with.

There are two ways to get what you want. Start with too much and slim down.
Start with too little and build up.

Personally, I think the latter is better but it requires that you know how gentoo works and can understand the portage error messages.
USE flags control optional dependencies only so

[manmath]

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

I was trying to give an example of how you will design your own install. That's just one big package :)

My main install uses a static /dev and has no autoblackmagic, so I know what you have ahead.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[manmath]

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

I don't know the answer but you can spread it out over weeks.

Normally, portage doen fetching and building in parallel but the original behaviour of fetch one, build one, should still be there.
Set

[manmath]

Ok. Seems fine with me.

Before committing, here's the last query. Can I install Gentoo in just one partition "/"? For long I never really needed a swap file/partition and a separate "/boot" partition. Besides, in SSDs the whole concept of partitioning seems wasteful (I might be wrong though). But going by the handbook, for BIOS systems it seems kinda 3 partitions needed: "/boot", swap, and "/".

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

I wonder what "a daily cap of 1.5 GB data from the access point" really means, but I shouldn't encourage you to bypass that :)
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[manmath]

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

How does it identify you though?
If you have several systems is the limit per system?
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[pietinger]

[NeddySeagoon]

manmath,

Only one partition works under a restricted set of circumstances.
1. You must BIOS boot.
2. You must use a DOS partition table. That infers that your HDD is <2.0TiB.

None of that is exactly future proof. The history is entertaining reading but you will have lived through some of it.

Just because you can does not mean to say that its a good idea.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[manmath]

[manmath]