Gentoo for the unexperienced user

[nagmat84]

I myself have been using Gentoo since more than two decades on all my systems. IMHO, it is own of the best distros.

Last week I was finally able to convince my (60+ yo) father to move away from Windows to Linux. Now, I am facing the problem to choose the right distro. Of course, I would prefer to install Gentoo, but I am concerned about how Gentoo handles world upgrades. While I am the "family admin" and I am there if something has to be changed (i.e. installation of a new laptop, installing new hardware, setting up a new mail account, etc.), I am not around on a regular basis to do trivial all-day maintenance tasks such as world upgrades. While I can setup Gentoo with an initial make.conf and setup USE flags appropriately, I won't be there on every occasion to fix upgrade problems due to changed USE flags and/or dependency conflicts.

As far as I understand, Gentoo does not support unattended background upgrades as most other distros do. The user always has to manually sync the repository and then explicitly run the upgrade procedure. Moreover, the upgrade procedure is not robust with respect to sudden shutdown or reboots.

While I could try to somehow automate "emerge --sync && emerge --deep --keep-going --update @world" via a cron job for root, there is nothing which would prevent my father from shutting down his PC in the middle of a running world upgrade. In particular, a half-way world upgrade would probably break the PC (just imagine the Qt libraries and some Plasma have already been compiled and merged, but the KDE libraries/apps are not yet upgraded).

How do you solve those problems for your elder family members which simply want to use their PC? Are there any tricks/tips or tools? Or is Gentoo simply not the right choice for that category of users?

[NeddySeagoon]

nagmat84,

I have a mirror install on my destop that I chroot into and build binary packages

At update time, bin binaries and the repo are shared with the target system over NFS.
Both systems are on the same network so NFS not being secure is not a problem.

The method is Build In A Chroot
My target system wan taking about 10d to update itself.

You will see build and USE flag changes before they get to the remote system.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[eeckwrk99]

While I completely understand why you would want to choose Gentoo in this case (long time user, stability..), I wouldn't personally in your situation. The main issue in my opinion:

[rfx]

Gentoo is great, we don't need to discuss it. But it is still not suitable for every user case.

My parents are over 70, so I thought about setting up gentoo as well (their old PC still ran very slowly on Windows 7). But I don't want to say when I visit them "now let's turn on your PC for 8 hours, there's a new Firefox + Thunderbird update" or some other big libraries.

So I use Debian with KDE Plasma on their PC, it's easy and it just works. If there are rare updates, the Plasma update service reports to the desktop. You just have to enter your root password, the rest runs automatically in the background and is done quickly because it is binary.

The PC does what it should, it just runs and is stable. My parents and I no longer have any work with it

[logrusx]

[nagmat84]

[NeddySeagoon]

nagmat84,

The build part of kernel upgrades will work on the build server but you will not got a binary package like all the rest.
I would expect the install part to fail.
Being lazy, I let the old weak system build its own kernel.

I've not used a ready made kernel and initrd in about 25 years, so I don't know the ins and out of it on Gentoo.

Late info.

Gentoo now offers a binhost. That was new in December.
To follow it totally, you need to use its profile and USE settings. The link is an overview.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[Linubie]

I use Manjaro it's basically Arch Linux but more user friendly on my second PC. It's easy to install and to maintain.
Maybe you like to check Manjaro for the mentioned purpose.
_________________
Mircosoft software is like having sex with a stranger, you always have to be careful not to get infected with something...

[sMueggli]

I would start with the needs of your father:

• what applications does he need and use?
  
• is he able to read distribution specific documentation?
  
• special software/codecs/drivers needed?
  

After that you need to choose between stable and rolling releases.

How do you want to support him? With a remote controlling tool (screen sharing) or just with an SSH access? And which Linux distribution can you support?

If you choose Gentoo, you should setup either a binhost on your infrastructure and compile all the packages for him or use the official Gentoo binhost. Setting the USE flags is maybe too much or too complicated for your father.

If you use a stable release distribution, you can in some cases choose between a long term support and a short term support release. And you should plan the version upgrades so that you are physically present. My favourites are Fedora (version upgrade every year) and Ubuntu (LTS releases so you can procrastinate version upgrades up to 5 years in case of LTS, but Ubuntu is forcing snaps [which are well suited for this use case]). Both have a huge user base and it is easier to find packages and support/documentation.

My rolling release favourites are Gentoo and Arch Linux. I have setup a binhost chroot on my main machine to compile basically all software for my Gentoo laptop and update the laptop with --usepkgonly. And the USE flags need to be the same in the chroot and on the laptop.
I have a daily-driver machine setup with Arch Linux. Mostly it is hassle-free. But it happened once that the X server did not start. And it might happen that the WLAN driver breaks and then you need physical access to the device.

[szatox]

[logrusx]