Where do you go, when even Gentoo isn't enough?

[lars_the_bear]

[NeddySeagoon]

lars_the_beas,

How far off piste do you want t go?

if you don't mind rounning your own overlay, you can add things that you never want, ever, to package.mask.
Now when you hit a hard dependency on a masked package, portage will shout at you.

You deal with it by copying the ebuild to your overlay and editing the ebuild there.
Results vary.

I run a static /dev system this way. udev and friends are not permitted.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[pingtoo]

lars_the_bear,

Just an idea,

Gentoo have a way to build entire rootfs from scratch. it is know as catalyst. I wonder if you would consider it. using catalyst you can create Gentoo to exact to you like.

I am currently building my stage4 with lto for selected packages. If you wish I be happy to share with my experience.

The reason I think you can consider catalyst is because I think you can accept one time effort to spend upfront to make up the setup. You just don't want to constantly chasing changes.

Another notes. I been working on my stage4 for 4-5 days now. It is a lot of time for adjust configuration and recompile. but I let the compilation over night so it does not bother me too much.

[logrusx]

Gentoo is the last stop. Maybe there's only Linux From Scratch left, but from your other threads I think it's absolutely not what you're looking for.

Best Regards,
Georgi

[C5ace]

[pietinger]

lars_the_bear,

you wrote:

[John R. Graham]

I like it! I've found just one more thing to say about those asterisked insights: when the load that Portage is allowed to put on the system is limited with a small --jobs (-j) value, the system remains usable while the update is under way. So, do I care about compile times? Well, yeah...but not that much.

- John
_________________
I can confirm that I have received between 0 and 499 National Security Letters.

[dmpogo]

Why on earth one would compile and even use qtwebengine ?

[flexibeast]

Yeah, qtwebengine and webkit-gtk are in my package.mask, because (fortunately) there's no software i need to use which has either of them as a hard dependency.

And, yeah, even on my recently-retired laptop, which had a Ryzen 5 3500U and only had 10G of usable memory for compilation (due to 2G being allocated to a Portage TMPDIR, which experimentation suggested was the optimum balance for my use-case), i set up Portage so that compilation was generally something that could just tick away in the background without noticeably affecting my activities on that box. On some occasions i might change this - for example, for a bug fix in software i need right now, but that was certainly the exception rather than the rule.

[eschwartz]

[rab0171610]

lars_the_bear -- I wanted to mention that I also avoid and do not use qtwebengine or webkit-gtk on either gentoo machine. I don't need any software that requires either.

If you have a faster machine on the local network that you can use as a distcc server it has been very helpful to me on the low-end Lenovo. The 4 gb of ram is not a problem as I am not using PORTAGE_TMPDIR on that machine locally in make.conf and the default local MAKEOPTS (number of jobs) are set to match the local number of CPU cores, which is 2.
The laptop does freeze occasionally and we have to do a hard reset to reboot so it is not perfect but it works and is responsive. The external USB connected NVME is attached to the back of the laptop screen with velcro. It is easy to remove and plug into a faster computer and run updates there. That machine would not even need to run gentoo, it could run any distro.
You may not always have the hardware you have now. Your next machine may be something more powerful so the limitations you are experiencing are not for eternity. Good deals crop up now and then.

[logrusx]

[lars_the_bear]

[lars_the_bear]

[logrusx]

[lars_the_bear]

[Hu]

You keep referencing how you have powerful hardware that you will lose when you retire, and that you don't want to buy new hardware out of retirement savings. Have you explored whether the company would sell you one of these more powerful systems instead of requiring you to return it? It's likely not that new anymore, so they may be only a year or two from retiring it for general hardware refresh reasons. If so, they might let you buy it for much cheaper than you could find powerful hardware on the open market. Since you've already been using it, you have a good idea of how well it has been treated, which you wouldn't know when you buy something secondhand from a discount electronics store / online exchange.

[lars_the_bear]

[C5ace]

[lars_the_bear]

[szatox]

[mrbassie]

[NeddySeagoon]

iars_the_bear,

Gentoo has got a lot more flexability than is displayed by the knobs provided by the official ::gentoo repo.
e.g. the xorg-server ebuild forces the use of elogind or systemd.
They both do the root setup required to be able to run the server as an upriviledged user.

There is another way. Its not officially suppored but it's the way it's always been until a year or two ago.
Run xorg-server as root.

The ebuild won't let you do that but if you regard the ::gentoo repo as a collection of starting points and not always to be used as given, the possibilities explode.

The repo is fuld of examples like that, it's down to what the developers have time to test and support.

If you do decide to stray from the well trodden path, post in Unsupported Software.
We have a few users, including me, who do just what I'm hinting at.
Its your Gentoo, your way. When it breaks, you can keep all the pieces.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

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

[pjp]

[dmpogo]