Diamond = easily shatter
Obsidian = fragile
Vibranium = fiction
Really?
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Heh. I wish my work were closer to hardware level, so that playing with compilation actually made some sense. If there is a kind soul here, please do tell me: does Gentoo look like it will still be around in some 10-15 years? I would hate to be too late to hop on the bus
I remember having a Gentoo install, seeing the wiki for how to install steam, and just dual booted with Bazzite.
I'll try again another time
Does flatpak steam have some problems? I don't use it so I don't know.
How hard is it to install gentoo anyway, and how would someone install anything on it. I've literally never used gentoo and the only distros i've used are linux mint, debian, fedora (not my cup of tea), arch (archinstall) and EndeavourOS (current) so i'm curious about the world of gentoo
Installing Gentoo itself isn't really any more difficult than Arch. Though I hear Arch has some easy way to install nowadays. It's kinda like installing Arch the old fashioned way.
At the end of the day if you follow the official installation guide, you'll be fine. If you miss a step, you get to learn valuable troubleshooting skills.
Installing anything is as easy as sudo emerge firefox, waiting for an hour for some obscure part in the compile process to fail, giing up, and doing sudo emerge firefox-bin. But tbh outside of browsers, most things compile fine unless you have esoteric optimization flags in your compiler config (-ffast-math breaks AV stuff for an example).
Ah and at some point you'll go "Hmm this six core CPU isn't enough, I need to upgrade to 16" because most of your packages will be compiled from scratch. And every update also compiles the same packages again (the ones that need to be updated, not all packages. Unless you specify that).
So why do it? It's fun, great learning experience and you can customize how your software is compiled (specify your CPU microarchitecture for compiler optimizations, use unsafe optimization flags if you want, use the USE flags to straight up leave functionality you don't need out of software). Also bragging rights.
Can we speed up the process using ccache?
Yes.
Bloatness is just an excuse to avoid all the problems of installing a new program in Gentoo.
Please, tell me they don't have to compile everything.
They don't have to. They GET to.
They actually don't but it is the way programs are installed on gentoo by default.
Compiling Firefox on my old ThinkPad took 9 hours
We don't. We can decide between binary packages and compiling.
That's kind of the point of Gentoo. Though it's not as hard as it sounds, the package manager (emerge) pretty much does it for you. It just might take a while.
Please don't be angry with me, but the package manager is called portage; emerge is just one commandline tool to interact with it.
No problem, tried Gentoo like once over 5 years ago. It was cool and fun but not a daily driver for me.
Gentoo has optional binary packages now.
Now is like 10 years if not more, no?
They've had individual -bin versions of a few big builds, like firefox, chromium, and libreoffice for basically forever.
They had something called distcc for a long time too. That let you, the user, cross-compile packages on one machine for installation on different machine(s).
But at the end of 2023, they dramatically expanded the system, adding configuration machinery to install $packagename from source or binary (i.e. not like firefox and firefox-bin). And they set up the server infrastructure to host a much larger number of official binary packages for amd64 and arm64. Around the same time they added a "distribution kernel" as an ebuild, so users no longer had to "compile it yourself". And I think the dist-kernel is now available as a binary.
Hang on, what? You're talking about the extra time (and electricity), or do you think it's in any way difficult/error prone?
I'm talking about laziness. And that stuff you named too.
I'm so confused. Gentoo users are too lazy to run sudo emerge thing?
Obsidian in this context is as fictional as vibranium.
Yeah obsidian is 5-5.5 on the moh's scale. It's softer than quartz. What makes it special is how sharp it can get, not how hard it is. Also, it's just really cool
Who says obsidian is hard?
Minecraft kids who don't know Mohs scale
Anything that isnβt the bootloader is just bloat
Tbf one of these things is fictional: Gentoo users
Oh hell naw.
I am a proud and vocal Gentoo user.
And you won't make me to back to binary packages. Fuck them.
USE flags are the best thing ever, reminding us why software should be Open.
Gentoo 4ever.
Former Gentoo user here. The thing I have in common with the other former Gentoo users I know IRL (a whopping 2 of them) is that none of us have the time for it anymore.
So if I ever find myself having too much free time, you bet your ass I'll reinstall Gentoo.
Funnily enough, the one irl Linux user I've met used Gentoo. I originally assumed they used arch.
I was a passioned Gentoo user for many years and I also only met 1 other IRL Gentoo user. Ok, there were more once at a Linux conference where a bunch of Gentoo users had a desk showing off Gentoo compiling @system for a BSD system.
Even the binary repository was not enough for me to not go back to Debian after ~10 years Gentoo usage. It was a fun hobby and a great learning experience.
I tried Gentoo once, I just straight up do not have time for that. It's fine, honestly nice even, but the waiting omg. Maybe I was doing things wrong but I don't have all day to sit around eating for things to compile
You can set up number of compile threads and keep working while updating.
I'm a living proof you're the opposite of right π
i was expecting a dumb joke like 'my d*ck' or something but agreed
I've never had high end machines but I don't remember installing being a chore on Gentoo even 20 years ago. Just
emerge openoffice
And let it do its thing in the background
But I went to use OpenOffice, not watch it do its thing in the background...
Yes, but there aren't that many programs that take long time to compile and those that do you install before hand. It's not like the size of the compile is hard to predict.