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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
Posts: 508
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 Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 8:25 am Post subject: |
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| flexibeast wrote: |
Even so, there's not even the possibility of improvement if people don't provide specific feedback. Again: i understand that creating/improving documentation is often a low priority for a number of people, and that requests can feel like they're effectively falling on deaf ears. But in the case of Gentoo, i can say that there are a number of us actively working on trying to improve things; and in my own particular case, one of the main reasons i track the forums is to keep an eye out for indications of a need for doc creation/improvement.
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Well, here is some specific feedback...
In the installation handbook, the section "Choosing the right profile" [1] says:
"Not only does it specify default values for USE, CFLAGS, and other important variables, it also locks the system to a certain range of package versions. "
But USE, CFLAGS, etc., have not been mentioned (AFAICS) at this point, so this is a head-scratcher. You have to read ahead a bit to find what USE means, and where CFLAGS are applied. The manual also gives the impression -- although it doesn't says so in so many words -- that profiles have a measure of permanence. I certainly read this section to mean that if I installed multiple systems, with the same profile, that their basic configuration would be the same. But, in fact, this turned out not to be the case, as I've raised elsewhere. The purpose of a profile, and how it interacts with USE settings, is not clear at this point -- and can't be, since USE settings have not been explained.
The, a little later, it talk about "Adding a binary host".
"In many cases, adding a binary package host will greatly decrease the mean time to package installation and adds much benefit when running Gentoo on older, slower, or low power systems."
What it doesn't say -- and again, will be obvious to Gentoo experts, but wasn't to me -- is that you can only take advantage of the binary host with particular kinds of configuration, and that the USE flags have an effect here.
So, when we do get to USE flags, the documentation does state what these are, and why you might want to change them. However, for a new-ish user, what's missing here is any discussion of the implications of changing them. I thought I could hack on these settings freely, and there would be no down-side to doing so. The interaction between USE flags, profile settings, and binary hosting are not clear. At least, not clear to me. Frankly, these things are still not entirely clear to me.
Don't get me wrong: the Gentoo installation manual is among the best I've ever read in this area. In fact, the documentation as a whole is pretty good. What's lacking, for me, is fundamental, architectural information. Gentoo works in a particular way. It's different to Fedora and what-not. I think one needs to understand how Portage works, how USE flags, profiles, etc., interact before planning an installation. So the installation guide could say: "Here's a step-by-step process that will get you to a working point if you have modern hardware, you're setting up only one installation, and you're happy with the maintainers' defaults for most things." But: "If you have specific requirements, you're planning multiple installations, you have hardware constraints, here's a heap of stuff you need to read before you even start...."
The installation manual does not (AFAIKS) even allude to the 'rolling release' nature of Gentoo. Does this matter at installation time? I think it does, because it has implications for how you plan the installation. There are going to be frequent updates, many of which will require compiling. There are ways to reduce the amount of compilation, but they have implications.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that the documentation is written for people who don't need documentation: I imagine that if you've been fiddling with Gentoo for ten years, all the stuff I'm confused about is just too obvious even to mention. In fact, I've even had comments to that effect from other people in this forum -- "we don't document this because it's obvious". Wasn't obvious to me, though.
There's a lot more I could say, if anybody wanted to listen 
BR, Lars.
[1]https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Base#Choosing_the_right_profile |
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 8:42 am Post subject: |
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| GDH-gentoo wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: | | It's plausible (increasingly plausible) that Gentoo isn't what I need. |
I'm afraid that if Gentoo isn't, nothing else will be  Constraint a) already rules Linux from Scratch (LFS) out. |
It turns out that MX Linux comes pretty close. It's pretty light to start with, particularly the Xfce4 variant, and it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level.
In practice, to run Gentoo on my old laptops, I have to use pre-compiled binary versions of everything, so much of the benefit of Gentoo is inaccessible to me anyway. So I have to question whether I want the pain of maintaining it, when I'm not getting all that much of the benefit.
I'm toying with the idea of using a desktop system (still old, but doesn't overheat) to compile Gentoo stuff for my laptops, but this is turning out to be a bigger pain in the rear end than I expected.
BR, Lars. |
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finoderi
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Joined: 29 Oct 2021
Posts: 70
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:12 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | ...it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level. |
It has GUI utilities for everything, so yeah. As for systemd it's deactivated and neutered, but still there 'for compatibility with Debian packages'.
But there are a lot of lightweight solutions for old laptops. Gentoo is just one of them. |
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lars_the_bear
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Joined: 05 Jun 2024
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 9:35 am Post subject: |
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| finoderi wrote: | | lars_the_bear wrote: | | ...it's relatively easy to remove things I don't need without breaking the entire installation (not like Ubuntu). No systemd, which appeals to me on a philosophical level. |
As for systemd it's deactivated and neutered, but still there 'for compatibility with Debian packages'.
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That's true for Gentoo as well: we're still stuck with systemd-udevd, and there are assorted systemd unit files lurking around. I'm not bothered about this, on either platform, but I know it irritates some people.
What's potentially a problem with MX -- and definitely not a problem with Gentoo -- is that MX is based on the Debian stable branch, so a lot of the packages are quite old. So I've found myself building stuff from source just to get later versions. What goes around, comes around, I guess.
The third-best platform I've found for my old laptops is Fedora's XFce variant. But this requires even more post-installation work to trim it down to a usable configuration.
I didn't have much success with Devuan, Calculate, Artix, Void, or Arch; but it's plausible that I didn't try hard enough. Gentoo works best, but the downsides are considerable, in my environment.
BR, Lars. |
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finoderi
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Joined: 29 Oct 2021
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| Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2024 10:21 am Post subject: |
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| lars_the_bear wrote: | | That's true for Gentoo as well: we're still stuck with systemd-udevd, and there are assorted systemd unit files lurking around. |
Not to that extent, but yes, systemd is everywhere now. |
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