Will compiling Gentoo on my hardware be fine and speedy?

[Physical Inlaw]

Hi Gentoo Forums,

I'm currently running void Linux as my daily driver and I'm loving g it. However, I'm soon going to be getting a new Laptop and since I'm a student at boarding school I'm mainly going to be able to compile in the weekend. And I would like to know wether the following hardware is good for getting gentoo compiled fast enough and without putting strain on my CPU this is the laptop I'm looking into currently https://www.pbtech.co.nz/product/NBKASU1504274/ASUS-Vivobook-Go-15-E1504FA-NJ274W-156-FHD-AMD-Ryz if your lazy and don't want to click on the link the here are my specs.

• AMD Ryzen™ 5 7520U Mobile Processor (4-core/8-thread, 4MB cache, up to 4.3 GHz max boost)
  
• 16GB LPDDR5 on board
  
• 512GB M.2 NVMe™ PCIe® 3.0 SSD
  

Also I might get a cooling stand for it just to help reduce the strain. And I've read that PSU cn be a problem when compiling what can I do to reduce the strain EG I've seen that its not recommended to leave at 100% for ages so should I charge to 100% then unplug let it discharge for a bit then re plug or is there something else I can do. Lastly is there some kind of precompiled kernel(Im I referring to the right thing in the install?) or do I just have to compile the tarball my self.

Thanks And I look forward to using gentoo!
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The easy way is never the best way

[fedeliallalinea]

I don't think there are any build issues, it's not the fastest processor but in my opinion it will do its job well.
You can work with MAKEOPTS value in order not to overload the system.
Also look at Portage TMPDIR on tmpfs wiki page.
There is also a pre-compiled kernel for gentoo sys-kernel/gentoo-kernel-bin, see Dist-Kernel wiki page.

-- edit --
for battery look in BIOS if there are settings for thresholds, I set in my lapdog 50-80%, this means that if the battery is below 50% it starts charging up to 80%.
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Questions are guaranteed in life; Answers aren't.

[NeddySeagoon]

Physical Inlaw,

Welcome to Gentoo.

"a cooling stand" == two thick books to allow airflow under most of the bottom of the laptop.
It's possible to operate some laptops on edge, so the cooling operates in a chimney. It all depends on where the air inlet and exhaust are.
Its best not to do that if you need to use it for other other things at the same time. :)

With 16G RAM a few big things will not compile with MAKEOPTS="-j8" as you don't quite have 2G real RAM per gcc process.
Its possible to set per package portage environment variables too, so that big things use a lower MAKEOPTS setting.
The same for /var/tmp/portage, which is the portage build space. It can be in tmpfs for most things and on the SSD for others.

Your CPU and SSD will be fine.

There are binary packages of a few big things, like the kernel, firefox ... look for packages with names ending in -bin.

Gentoo has started an experimental binhost.
A drawback with using any binaries is that you don't choose the USE flags. It turn that forces USE settings for some of the packages that prebuilt binaries depend on.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[stefan11111]

[Physical Inlaw]

[rfx]

me personal think, that the compile times are not a big deal. I use a Intel Celeron n5105 (4 Cores up to 2,8 GHz), 16GB DDR4 Ram and SSD. I give it 12GB tmpfs and MAKEOPTS="-j4".

Xorg and Wayland both took less than 2 hours for compiling. Dist-Kernel 96Minuts. For KDE-Plasma i need to disable tmpfs cause the size of the paket rust, so without tmpfs it took 576 Minutes. Firefox and Thunderbird with tmpfs each around a bit more than 2 Hours.

I let the updates compile over night wenn i am not on the computer "emerge -avuND world && shutdown -h now". It is evereytime ready when i want to work on the next day.

With a 8Core Ryzen and 16GB DDR5-Ram your compile times will be much faster. But you should consider whether it is worth the effort it takes to learn how to install Gentoo. And you should be aware that this will not give you a lightspeed quantum computer. maybe the boot process will reduce 5%, maybe not. maybe your firefox will open a fraction of a second faster, maybe not.

My personal feeling when buying this slow celeron on amazon a few month ago, windows 11 was preinstalled. turning on, the desktop was so slow. i installed kubuntu, still slow. with gentoo and plasma, it is still slow but feeling smoother. but maybe that's just imagination.


But in any case I would recommend you to simulate the installation process in a virtual machine before you venture to your real computer. there are some great and simply explanatory youtube videos to accompany you

[NeddySeagoon]

Physical Inlaw,

If you try to build libreoffice with MAKEOPTS="-j8" in 16G of RAM, I would expect it to fail due to running out of real RAM.
The kernel Out of Memory Manager (OOM) will kick in and kill one of your make jobs.
Its kill a user space process to free RAM for the kernel or panic.

Most things will work with MAKEOPTS="-j8" though.

You can either reduce MAKEOPTS= globally in make.conf or wire and use per package settings in /etc/portage/env/* /etc/portage/package.env/*

For some worked examples see /etc/portage/env/ thats definitions.
/etc/portage/package.env is a group of files that apply the definitions above to individual packages.

That particular example is from my Raspberry Pi 4 build host but the method is not architecture dependent.

The libreoffice example is a bit contrived. It now has a pre merge test for 2G RAM per MAKEOPT which would fail, so it fails early without wasting build time.
There are other packages like that too.

This is mostly fine tuning. If you choose global settings that work, no fine tuning is required.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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