[thinking aloud] My next Gentoo instl'tn will be big change

[teika]

[Just thinking aloud, don't read or you can waste your time. Far from concise. This is posted not in the Installation forum, but in Gentoo Chat.]

After two decades of being a Gentoo user, my next installation will have many changes. It's for my personal, home use.

* OpenRC -> systemd
I don't have any reason to switch to systemd, just like other OpenRC users. However I've been using chroot-Arch recently, and its ability is quite limited unless the host system is not systemd. I'm not sure if I'll use Arch again now, but it's better to have systemd from the beginning than to switch a working OpenRC gentoo box into systemd. (Probably better to virtualize than chroot.)

Sigh. I have to learn a lot and prepare many scripts and config files.

I heavily rely on atd. It's really old but I should retain it for a while.

* Btrfs
My history: ext2 -> reiser (3? 4?) -> xfs -> ext4. I think I've been using LVM before 2010, too.
When I bought my current pc in 2016 I considered Btrfs, but I'm conservative / a coward / careful / lazy, and I chose to stick to ext4. (IIRC xfs was really slow in file deletion, but today the Gentoo Handbook recommends it.)

I now have the HDD. But for SSD, LVM w/ unused areas is bad; you should level wearing as much as possible. So I'll use Btrfs and use the almost entire SSD. When necessary, I'll shrink. (And it's not /dev/sda? Until a few weeks ago we had /dev/hda.)

In addition to the gentoo-root subvolume, I might create boot (or gentoo-boot) and gentoo-home, but I'm not sure.

The first time I read about btrfs I felt overwhelmed, but this is not so much a problem.

* rEFInd
I have never been a fan of cryptic set-up of grub 1/2, which boasts 1980's style "configuration". (Hey I manually update grub.conf. For me this is easiest.)

Switching to rEFInd must be easy. I dual boot with MS Win, so I need a bootloader.

* LiveDVD installer
I don't remember the last time. This time I'll install the iso image into an external drive partition, and boot it. I don't want to - indeed there's no reason to - allocate an entire HDD to an installation medium.

* After it's settled
X -> Wayland migration

I heavily hack xkb config and the window manager, so it's a headache, but almost all agree that once Wayland is set to run, it's far better.

My sole Wayland compositor choice is likely to be qtile - I script a lot with Sawfish now. Dunno why people are ok with unhackable WMs.
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