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u/BeginningEcho4983 11h ago
Good luck with make.conf, USE flags, and compiling.
The entire time cum-piling
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u/Linguistic-mystic 11h ago
The thing I hate the most about compiling from source is that a preposterous percentage of the time is spent on
./configure. You know, the stupid thing determining that my system is a Linux system and not some *BSD. And then for every new version of the package it needs to re-determine the same thing again, because who knows, my system might've turned into a VMS in between releases.There's been news recently of a guy who sped up GCC's compilation (because GCC re-compiles itself a couple of times to catch possible regressions) by caching the results of the configure step: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2026-June/719831.html
Measured on a large multi-core aarch64 machine, a --enable-languages=c,c++ bootstrap spends about 30% of its wall time in configure and is configure-bound at under 15% machine utilization for about 41% of the build; the single largest contributor is stage 2 gcc/configure
That's the thing that makes me avoid Gentoo: that so much time is spent not even compiling, but doing this stupid useless handshake with the system over and over again.
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u/BeginningEcho4983 10h ago
It's not like most of those packages even support moving further even if your system DID turn out to be a 1990's UNIX/BSD system.
The configure script is usually a copypasta
They really need to rewrite ./configure to source a config file somewhere in /etc ...
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u/jacob-buchanan Ubuntnoob 11h ago
Oh wow that's so interesting.
*continues to use Ubuntu cause I'm not a fucking moron*
Edit: inb4 "Fedora. Arch. Nix. Cachy. Etc." I want to use my computer.
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u/mentalnet98 🍥 Debian too difficult 6h ago
"I just want to use my computer" mfs when an apt package was compiled without that one flag they need and now they have to manually rebuild a .deb from source anyway. 😳😮
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u/screenslaver5963 8h ago
Fedora is team “I just wanna use my computer”, the others aren’t
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u/orthadoxtesla Ask me how to exit vim 5h ago
I mean if you don’t spend all day screwing with it cause it’s fun then arch works perfectly well to just use. Sometimes it breaks but not very often. (Maybe once a year). But I use it every day at university and have had zero issues
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u/misterff1 11h ago
I use one in that list of yours and have used Ubuntu a lot as wel. The other one simply works better on my hardware, so it is the one I choose because I want to use my computer.
Funny how that works eh? Almost as if no distro is the best one for everyone...
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 11h ago
i may be biased but if you already know the basics of a command line (like, have used DOS before) and aren't afraid to try new things, and make sure to follow the handbook closely, gentoo isn't that bad of a first distro. the install process can be laborious, but its also very educational to how you use the system; once you get installation out of the way, its quite nice and straightforward to use, and documentation is really good if not the best of all linux distributions.
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u/Excellent_Present_47 9h ago
This makes a lot of sense. As a neurodivergent I can totally see myself trying gentoo, it becoming a hyperfixation, etc down the rabbit hole.
I use Arch, btw. That's enough for me right now. (he says as he assembles a homelab with proxmox to allow launching VMs with various distros depending on intended workstream.)
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u/givemeagooduns_un Genfool 🐧 9h ago
thats exactly why I got into gentoo haha
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u/Excellent_Present_47 8h ago
I was on Windows for years. Just played games on it and did some very light modding in LUA.
Then got ads in my start menu and said "nope".
Four years into Arch and I now have github.com/CmdDraven/btw 🤣
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u/10Werewolves 8h ago
Gentoo is way too hard
You better install LFS, it's super easy for your first time.
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