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bjorntj
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Joined: 01 Jun 2005
Posts: 402
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 Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 11:56 am Post subject: How stable is Gentoo now? |
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I used to run Gentoo but the last couple of years I have mainly been running Fedora... The reason I went away from Gentoo, was that the emerge updates too often broke my system in some way... So I am thinking about trying Gentoo again and was wondering things are kind of stable and minimal of system breakage?
Regards,
BTJ
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Last edited by bjorntj on Fri May 06, 2011 12:46 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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d2_racing
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Joined: 25 Apr 2005
Posts: 13047
Location: Ste-Foy,Canada
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| Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 12:30 pm Post subject: |
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Hi, I have been running a Gentoo testing box for a couple of years and I must say that it's pretty stable even on the testing arch.
You should retry  |
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Hypnos
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Joined: 18 Jul 2002
Posts: 2889
Location: Omnipresent
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| Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 1:56 pm Post subject: |
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I've been running Gentoo as my primary OS since 2002. I've done this because I decided a long time ago to eschew binary distros, and Gentoo is a well-functioning option: configuration and installation behave as I would expect, and when things break I can fix them. Whether or not particular applications or drivers work is partly due to the Gentoo maintainer, but mostly due to upstream. You can choose to run software declared stable (as I do), or be a bit more adventurous by using ebuilds in testing.
If you define stability differently, e.g. everything works out of the box, no questions asked, there may be better options: FreeBSD/OpenBSD stable, Debian stable, etc.
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bjorntj
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Joined: 01 Jun 2005
Posts: 402
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| Posted: Fri May 06, 2011 5:25 pm Post subject: |
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By stable I mean I don't won't to fix broken emerges every other week... But I guess I will try to install Gentoo again and see what happends... 
BTJ
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Someone wrote:
"I understand that if you play a Windows CD backwards you hear strange Satanic messages"
To which someone replied:
"It's even worse than that; play it forwards and it installs Windows" |
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phajdan.jr
Retired Dev
Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1777
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 8:03 am Post subject: |
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Did you use ~arch or experimental overlays when everything was breaking? I'm running multiple stable (arch) systems and there are no major problems.
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XQYZ
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Joined: 19 Jul 2009
Posts: 231
Location: Europe
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 8:54 am Post subject: |
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| There's rarely anything major. Just pay attention to the updates a bit, remember to recompile kernel modules and run "emerge --depclean" and "revdep-rebuild" after every update and you will be fine. |
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adomas
n00b
Joined: 04 May 2011
Posts: 20
Location: Berlin, Germany
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 9:11 am Post subject: |
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| I just installed/complied Gentoo on x86_64 platform with ~amd64 and it's very stable. I am in love with Gentoo again using this machine as Desktop Computer with KDE SC 4.6.2 and everything is just fine. |
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bjorntj
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Joined: 01 Jun 2005
Posts: 402
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 10:33 am Post subject: |
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| phajdan.jr wrote: | | Did you use ~arch or experimental overlays when everything was breaking? I'm running multiple stable (arch) systems and there are no major problems. |
I did use some ~arch but none experimental overlays... As far as I remember, I think udev was what quarreled the most....
Thx for the response everyone; I am getting my new PC on Monday and you have persuaded me to install Gentoo..
BTJ
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Someone wrote:
"I understand that if you play a Windows CD backwards you hear strange Satanic messages"
To which someone replied:
"It's even worse than that; play it forwards and it installs Windows" |
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phajdan.jr
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Joined: 23 Mar 2006
Posts: 1777
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Sat May 07, 2011 10:39 am Post subject: |
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If you want to avoid breakages, then arch is definitely more stable than ~arch. Anyway, many things have improved: portage, other tools. We also build with --as-needed which reduces the number of required rebuilds... The less "weird" things you do, the more stable the system should be, except bugs of course.
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bammbamm808
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Joined: 08 Dec 2002
Posts: 548
Location: Hawaii
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| Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 9:05 pm Post subject: Re: How stable is Gentoo now? |
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| bjorntj wrote: | I used to run Gentoo but the last couple of years I have mainly been running Fedora... The reason I went away from Gentoo, was that the emerge updates too often broke my system in some way... So I am thinking about trying Gentoo again and was wondering things are kind of stable and minimal of system breakage?
Regards,
BTJ |
It's better than it used to be, and I'm not all that great at this, but have over 7 happy years w/Gentoo as my primary OS (except when I HAVE to play TF2). Just read the documentation and the forums to be aware of potential problems before new emerges. And have your LiveCD handy just in case. Like the other poster said, it's mostly minor problems that are relatively easiy remedied, but you have to read the portage notices and other available documentation.
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skellr
l33t
Joined: 18 Jun 2005
Posts: 989
Location: The Village, Portmeirion
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| Posted: Wed May 11, 2011 9:49 pm Post subject: |
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| There are less compile problems now. Now most time is spent yelling at the package manager(s). |
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ShadowHawkBV
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Joined: 27 Mar 2004
Posts: 352
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| Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2011 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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The removal of hal caused some grief, but nothing significant. Portage has been really improved since the last time you used Gentoo. But then Gentoo is my drug of choice on all but my netbook(Ubuntu & OpenSuSE unfortunately), so I may be considered a bit biased.
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SLBMEH
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Joined: 16 Aug 2003
Posts: 299
Location: Pittsburgh, PA
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:08 pm Post subject: |
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In my experience using Gentoo over the past decade... once you have a system installed stuff really only breaks if you break it. For example, I jumped on to test out amd64 when there was no stable tree... or the stable tree wasn't enough to build a system... amd64 has come a long way since then... in general full ~arch builds can break from time to time... especially if you have ridiculous compile settings or use flag combinations set... a lot of times things break because you're trying to do system wide configuration for things that aren't quite ready to be configured system wide... i broke a lot of things forcing as-needed to ld... i would have to say that the stability:up-to-date ratio is one of the best... some packages that you have to compile and patch by hand on other distros, because they don't have an up to date package on it, work perfectly fine and are up to date in portage...
Gentoo itself is a very powerful distribution and environment... it gives you plenty of things to tweak which comes with plenty of things that can be broken... if you're changing something from the default settings be sure you know what kind of impact it creates... especially if you are doing a global configuration change... don't listen to everything you hear such as... use flag "xyxnd" makes everything so much faster... it's generally something experimental... and a lot of the times faster comes with a hit in stability... find a good balance between the two... do your homework when configuring an application for the first time... and do your own benchmarks instead of taking someone's word for some magic configuration setting that makes everything faster... in general the default settings are very sane, fairly optimized, and pretty stable... you should only need to change it in special circumstances...
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Jaglover
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Joined: 29 May 2005
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Location: Saint Amant, Acadiana
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| Posted: Mon Jun 27, 2011 11:54 pm Post subject: |
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Stable - what you call stable? A box that does not crash or a box that needs user input with upgrades every now and then? Running ~arch gives you very stable system running-wise. You can ignore failing emerges, they will be fixed. Or you can contribute and report bugs.
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axelmasok
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Joined: 08 Oct 2003
Posts: 171
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| Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2012 7:38 am Post subject: |
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Been a long time since I have used Gentoo. I'm posting this to find out when I actually registered. I too got tired of fixing portage (~2007). If I didn't update portage often enough and then dared to run the update all hell used to break loose.
Anyway I am back using my old Opteron and am annoyed at how lethargic Ubuntu 12.10 is on it. Was half tempted to give it another Gentoo workout. We shall see.
The Gentoo forums are still the best IMO. I still come back here to read up on issues.
(Oct 2003 yikes) |
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xaviermiller
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Joined: 23 Jul 2004
Posts: 8723
Location: ~Brussels - Belgique
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| Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2012 7:55 am Post subject: |
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Hello,
I am running ~arch since 2004, and ~arch is REALLY stable since 2008. Too boring in fact : no more need to fix broken systems, except if you play with live ebuilds and funky architectures like x32.
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Goverp
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Joined: 07 Mar 2007
Posts: 2216
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| Posted: Fri Nov 09, 2012 8:49 am Post subject: |
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| axelmasok wrote: | ...
If I didn't update portage often enough and then dared to run the update all hell used to break loose.
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I run stable AMD64, and it's been very stable. But, as you imply, leaving it too long between updates can lead to grief. I try to update once a fortnight, and suspect that monthly wouldn't be a problem. But annually will likely be a problem, reading other posts on the subject of "I haven't updated for ages, and it's broken".
After updating (a) run etc-update or any of its more user-freindly pals (I use etc-proposals), though a recent change to portage stopped it asking about updates to config files that haven't been touched since the previous install, and that reduced an awful lot of pointless tweaking.
Always read and if necessary act on news items.
Check your emerge logs (I use elogviewer, and deselect the setup messages), though after something like a KDE update of 100+ packages, it's easy to fall into a rhythm and realise you just deleted something without actually reading it 
And finally keep your kernel up to date. If you use portage-2 you get a couple of useful sets to emerge after updating the kernel -
@module-rebuild
@x11-module-rebuild
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logical_guy
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Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 268
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 11:21 am Post subject: |
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Hey guys...
I found this in the FAQs section of rxvt-unicode:
link--> http://pod.tst.eu/http://cvs.schmorp.de/rxvt-unicode/doc/rxvt.7.pod#Meta_Features_amp_Commandline_Issues
| Quote: | There are three big problems with Gentoo Linux: first of all, most if not all Gentoo systems are completely broken
(missing or mismatched header files, broken compiler etc. are just the tip of the iceberg); secondly, the Gentoo maintainer
thinks it is a good idea to add broken patches to the code; and lastly, it should be called Gentoo GNU/Linux.
For these reasons, it is impossible to support rxvt-unicode on Gentoo. Problems appearing on Gentoo systems will usually
simply be ignored unless they can be reproduced on non-Gentoo systems. |
So, what is this person talking about here? |
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John R. Graham
Administrator
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Posts: 10749
Location: Somewhere over Atlanta, Georgia
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 11:29 am Post subject: |
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Aside from the trolling?  This is probably mostly a historical leftover from Gentoo ricers contacting them. For one exceptionally stellar, example, see the HOLY COW I'M TOTALLY GOING SO FAST OH F*** bug. Many upstream developers don't like to be contacted if- You're using the latest experimental gcc (or icc, or clang).
- You're using bizarre, hyperoptimized CFLAGS or LDFLAGS.
To help combat that type of reaction, it's best to try to reproduce problems with minimal (some might say, "sane") CFLAGS and stable compiler before reporting an issue upstream.
That said, rxvt-unicode is stable and maintained in Gentoo.
- John
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logical_guy
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Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 268
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:08 pm Post subject: |
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| John R. Graham wrote: | | Aside from the trolling? This is probably mostly a historical leftover from Gentoo ricers contacting them. |
And what/who are ricers? |
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Jaglover
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logical_guy
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:17 pm Post subject: |
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ooof that was painful |
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aCOSwt
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Joined: 19 Oct 2007
Posts: 2537
Location: Hilbert space
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:55 pm Post subject: |
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| logical_guy wrote: | | So, what is this person talking about here? |
Well, mostly highlighting the well known contribution of generalization to human's stupidity ! 
In Gentoo, you know that there is no installer, you are the installer.
In Gentoo, you administrate your own system and this system will be as stable as you are in your own mind.
My Gentoo is very stable. Why ? Because I have a retarded way of considering the concept of stability :
- Whatever package in my world set will be upgraded if and only if I actually need this particular update. (New functionality, bug fixes...)
- Each time a new version of whatever dependency I know nothing about becomes available... I mask it !
- Then I walk around Gentoo forums watching what happens :
- Dozens of more or less duplicate help threads about it ? Threads closed by JRG because some rant went too far ? Contributors banned for having blamed devs too much ? => Keep this upgrade masked ! (I do not necessarily think of any particular package...  )
- Nothing like this happening ? Wait for a week or two, one month for what concerns the toolchain... still nothing ? => Backup, Unmask and Update !
And the life with Gentoo is 
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Hypnos
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Location: Omnipresent
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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aCOSwt,
I follow the same policy as you for world packages. But for a dependency I only update when the installed version disappears from the tree
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John R. Graham
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Joined: 08 Mar 2005
Posts: 10749
Location: Somewhere over Atlanta, Georgia
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| Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2012 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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| logical_guy wrote: | | And what/who are ricers? |
Good answers so far. The definitive source of information on Gentoo Ricing can be found at http://funroll-loops.info/. (Thanks to tomk for reminding me where that was.)
- John
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Gentoo on AMD64
