What a hot take. I bet you’re real fun at parties.

Some easy display rules, and a couple of plugins and it’s perfect.

It doesn’t matter. Put it in ~/foo/bar/Baz for all the shell cares.

If you don’t have root is it really a VPS?

Anyway, unpack the binaries to ~/local/usr/bin and add that to your PATH.

It’s not quite what you’ve asked for here, but as a Dev I’d be remiss if I didn’t shill for Gentoo.

It ticks your rolling release box, has fantastic docs, a huge package repository (and the community repo Guru), and by design enables almost infinite configurability and customisation. We also have a binary package repository now for popular architectures, so you can choose to avoid compiling if you don’t want to deviate from sane defaults (or only compile in cases where you do!)

On the hardware side, we have fantastic support for a number of architectures, I recently brought up a SPARC system and have some arch64 and riscv in the past.

Finally, even if you just decide to check the distro out, the process of installing, configuring, and maintaining a Linux system is outlined in detail within our handbook, and can provide a peek behind the scenes at what some other distros abstract; it’s a fantastic learning experience for those interested.

Finally, we have fantastic support through volunteers in official IRC channels and forums, as well as unofficial hubs like discord.

Hopefully I’ve planted a seed and you’ll check it out down the line. :)

Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.

man would like to have words with your strawman.

No, this is egregious, even for Dan. Don’t feel bad. I called him out on the forums/article comments.

I’m looking at bringing Dillo back into Gentoo atm. I had to read 15k lines of code, and that’s just what’s different since the last release…

I’m a huge proponent of Gentoo Linux as a learning experience. It’s a great way to learn how the components of a system work together and the distro enables an amazing amount of configurability for your system.

Even following a handbook install in a VM can be a good experience if you’re interested.

I once spent a month automating the production of repositories for each kernel version supported on our HPC and rested every step exhaustively in isolation.

When I was satisfied I ran it with root permissions and hosed the VMs it was running on because a recursive chmod evaluated to /.

Oops.

Pipewire is great .

Write out syslogs to disk or better yet mirror to grayling or something, there might be valuable information right before the reboot.

I’ve also had weirdness where the CPU/iGPU was just faulty and the IME would halt the system. That took weeks to diagnose.

Definitely reach out to support!

No idea, I don’t arch.

Theoretically you can install a desktop amd64 system using the binhost without compiling anything (or if compilation is required there won’t be much), I haven’t tried though I have seen other users do it successfully.

You want to run a stable debian kernel, not “bleeding edge” stuff from the backports repo. It’s likely that your NVIDIA drivers are not compatible with the more modern kernel, either for real reasons (they’re old) or because that’s how they were packaged.

Aha, would you mind elaborating? That sounds like quite the issue for Pacman to break its own dependencies.

There was a bug with http/2 in a particular version of curl, which was very quickly updated in the arch repos and rolled out to users; It broke pacman’s ability to sync.

It’s one of those frustrating things that happens, and someone has to hit the bug first. It’s nice to have a “stable” and “testing” branch so that users explicitly opt-in to bleeding edge packages.

Ah okay, I was under the impression that the installation didn’t require installing from source with the new binary system – I thought it was more akin to Arch’s installation where you just select your kernel binary in Pacman, then download, and install.

This is just the base system - it’s like any other distribution’s base install except that we don’t have an official ‘installer’; Gentoo distributes tarballs that users unpack following the guidance in the handbook.

From there most packages can be installed as a binary if the USE flags line up (and it has been asked to do so), otherwise portage will compile it for you.

After unpacking the system image you can install a binary kernel, have portage compile one for you, or manage it manually (but still let portage fetch sources)

Gentoo has a great system for managing configuration changes when a package updates a file that you’ve customised.

Would you have any resources/documentation for me to look into this more?

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Dispatch-conf

I misworded my original post – I was referring to things like updating the kernel. I thought that maybe the kernel would be a binary, so it would not have to be recompiled like how I would assume it usually does.

It comes down to user choice. That can now be entirely binary or from source (or from source but managed by portage)

This sounds very appealing to me, but I must admit that these sorts of configurations do seem like they would be mildly daunting to juggle on a production machine.

It’s actually pretty straightforward - you nominate packages that you want to run on ~arch (testing) and add them to some config files. Portage handles the rest.

Any thoughts or comments are welcome

If this is a corporate decide your cyber security team have really dropped the ball by enabling you to change the boot order.

Oh look an essay full of fearmongering that adds nothing to the discussion. Thanks for contributing!

Using binary packages — those that are offered — is missing out on a key strength of Gentoo and the primary reason one may choose it over another.

Gentoo is about enabling choice. The choice to use non-customised binary packages to fill a need is still a choice.

It’s incredibly unsupported and untested. You have no idea what bugs you’ll be uncovering.

This has been answered a bit already but:

So, in summary, is a binary Gentoo functionally equivelant to Arch Linux, but with more control over the system?

Perhaps, if that’s how you view the world. I’d argue that it’s better as I’ve never seen Gentoo ship a version of curl that broke Portage…

I would like to know more about the following:

1. Does the OS installation change, and, if so, how?

You basically unpack a tarball, select a kernel, install a bootloader, and go. It’s no different to before except that you can optionally choose to enable the use of binary packages.

2. Does package installation, updates, and maintenance change, and, if so, how?

If comparing to arch, you use portage to handle that but the concept is the same.

Gentoo has a great system for managing configuration changes when a package updates a file that you’ve customised.

3. Do system updates change, and, if so, how?

This question doesn’t make much sense to me. What is a “system update”? Isn’t that just updating all of your packages at once?

4. Do you lose any potential control over the system when using the binaries, rather than compiling from source, and, if so, what?

Yes and no. If you customise your USE flags the binary won’t be suitable and instead portage will build the package as you requested it

5. Are there any differences in system stability? Can I expect things to break more readily on a binary Gentoo compared to Arch Linux?

Hahahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Hahaha. Ha.

Arch is notorious for shipping barely tested software to have the higher version number in their repo.

Gentoo enables users to select the stable or testing path, on a per package basis, so you have to opt into packages that haven’t been well tested and even those are typically better tested than arch.