I did Gentoo in my 20s when all I could afford was garbage computers. I enjoyed the experience — whether it did or not, it made me feel like I was getting the most out of whatever I had, and I learned SO much about Linux.
Agreed. I blew up. Multiple Gentoo installs, but by the time I stopped using it, I could recover from any of my mistakes. I still miss portage but I actually use my linux machines now instead them being the project themselves :p. I’m a boring Debian boy now…
Run a Gentoo Prefix maybe? You get portage and can install customized packages like one does, without risking the system.
The beauty is that you never fully install the Gentoo you want. It’s about the journey and the friends we make along the way, not the destination.
How does one install friends (i want to compile them first)
emergefrom your parents’ basement(challenge level: impossible)
“Yes, but after you do, it’ll be blazing fast in the twenty minutes before you’ll have to recompile due to software updates.”
“So, you’re saying that it would have been really efficient if all my eight cores weren’t constantly pegged building software?”
“…Uh, yes.”
“And that optimizing software for the native architecture could have enabled power savings, if those machines weren’t all burning oceans of kilowatt hours building the same software over and over again redundantly?”
“Ah…”
I wonder what CPU performance you would need so that it is compiling all the time given: average package release rate and average compile time of the most commonly installed ones.
Well, it’d be highly contingent on what set of packages one has installed, but it’s an interesting question.
I’m guessing this guy is still performing the demonstration tutorial that he started in 1999
