gentoo to arch - good to see

dtw · 2005-04-26 03:08:22

which i missed!

yeahy! no flame war!

it was a toss up between arch and gentoo for me too back then but i run a laptop and the fans just don't like the compiling - nuff said

darkcoder · 2005-04-26 05:10:51

dibblethewrecker wrote:

The Arch community could certainly benefit from insight from contributing members of the gentoo community and could learn from some of their stronger projects. in this respect it is almost a bit sad that distro monogamy is so strong
by the way, if this turns into (yet another arch vs ...) flame war

well, that means that either:1. people do not read.
2. people do not understand (Homer Simpson would say... Doh!)
3. people can not follow instructions.
Going on topic, while I haven't worked on any Gentoo project at all, the experience I got submiting fixes to packages, and writing new ones help me a lot when I began using Arch. I feel practically at home, since ebuilds a year a half ago were very similar to PKGBUILD right now. In no time I was modyfing or building packages here on Arch.

jery_wang2002 · 2005-05-18 05:29:25

And to add my experience:

incinerator wrote:

my 2 cents,
I switched from Gentoo to Arch about 2 months ago. I am very satisfied with Arch and I currently have no plans to go back to Gentoo. The main reasons for this are:
1.) Maintenance effort: Arch reduces the time I have to spent to keep my system up-to-date by ca. 90%.

YES, YES, YES, and YES
I started with the handbook to install stage 2 and trying to be adventerous to install ~ package (Gnome 2.10, hey many other distros already have it- end April 2005). It took me whole Saturday and early Sunday before I gave up.

incinerator wrote:

2.) Simplicity: According to my experience, more things in Arch work out-of-the-box. Also, the Arch wiki is better explaining how to handle things that don't.

YES. No mask, unmask, and at the middle of looooooong compilation the fellow just stop due to some errors!!!!

incinerator wrote:

3.) Less breakage: With Gentoo, something borks badly every now and then, that happens way less often with Arch (I only remember a minor udev screw-up).

Can't comment.
I did not even manage to see xorg installed not too mention gnome.

jery_wang2002 · 2005-05-18 06:01:05

LB06 wrote:

It is not my intention to hijack this topic, but I'm wondering how do you see (Free)BSD in this picture? I mean, it's simple, it has a binary and source based package manager and it's fast. At least on the surface it does look a lot like Arch, even more than Gentoo does imho.

It is better than Gentoo in respect of binary packaging. Gentoo does not provide GRP for Gnome 2.10 and KDE 3.4. FreeBSD 5.4 already has them.

But compiling from source:

Gentoo: if you dare to step to ~ and unmask something, thing can go wrong in the middel of installation. And that could be an error after your machine compiling for 10 hours. You have to redo that from the beginning.

FreeBSD is more forgiving, if it stops you can continue again and those obj(s) are not lost you start from where you were just before the error. The worse part is when you install large app like gnome or kde, in the middle of instlllaion, it pops up selection box. Of course you are not going to sit there to wait to answer this dialog box. Sometimes if you don't check regularly, the thing just waiting for you to hit OK.

-----

FreeBSD is fast, very fast. But there is anoying error where when you open gnome themes all other gnome applet/window dissapear. (Acknoledge problem, see FreeBSD Gnome project, somwhere in the site). Yeah, the advice was, no problem just open/restart those application that crashed. Huh??? What about my works in one of the window? We used to make fun of Blue screen of death of Windows, I use XP in office from morning to afternoon and it never crash and no blue screen of death since the PC was installed three years ago.

I really hope application in Linux will have the robustness and stability that the user can trust.

nightfrost · 2005-05-19 18:43:09

Gentoo was actually the distro which made me land in linux. I started off switching between various distros, and I think what made me stick with Gentoo - as opposed to public opinion - was the ease of configuring the system. One is from the start encouraged to actually edit the config files. But not only that - all config files contain very good defaults and very informative comments.

After a while, though, I started looking for alternatives due to various reasons - e.g. a downgrade in speed, hardware-wise (moving to a laptop), was making the compile times really intolerable. That's when I first realized how amazingly slow all other distros were. (Until this day, I just can't understand why distros aiming for desktop use are compiled with -march=i386). I looked for i686-optimized distros and Arch seemed interesting (The speed difference between -march=i686 and -march=pentium4 is really unnoticable compared to the difference between -march=i386 and -march=i686, IMO). I was immediately impressed but I couldn't quite leave gentoo. But then, just a couple of days ago, I encountered some really peculiar problems with my wireless network card (more precisely; after running dhcpcd, the connection with the access point disappears). While continueing in my search to find a solution, I took my chances with Arch in order to be able to use my wifi-card. Well, needless to say, while exploring all the gems and wonders of this lovely distro (most noticeably abs - I just stumbled across something called srcpac which seems to be regarded very highly, don't know what it is yet though, but gonna find out ), it feels less and less compelling to return to gentoo.

I hope this marvelous distro will keep on to flourish!

dtw · 2005-05-20 06:36:47

I just can't understand why distros aiming for desktop use are compiled with -march=i386

surely YOU DO know why, don't you?

iphitus · 2005-05-20 07:04:28

not all, for example mandrake and derivatives are all i586.

nightfrost · 2005-05-20 11:42:32

dibblethewrecker wrote:

I just can't understand why distros aiming for desktop use are compiled with -march=i386
surely YOU DO know why, don't you?

eh... you making me feel kinda stupid here.. no I don't really. I mean; I know optimized packages wouldn't work on older architectures, but almost no one runs anything older than pentium3 (on a desktop system) anyway. And if one has an old pentium or 486, then there's always debian, or slackware, and a bunch of other "generic" distros. But taking Ubuntu as an example - a distro that AFAIK recompiles every .deb for their own repositories and adapts GNOME as the default DE - would really gain on -march=i686. I tried installing Ubuntu (with gnome) on a P2 - that wasn't a pretty sight. But if this is not what you mean, then you have me at a loss :-/

not all, for example mandrake and derivatives are all i586.

Well what d'ya know - you learn something new everyday

dtw · 2005-05-20 11:55:26

well, yup, that is why they do it, so that it runs on older hardware - i agree some that some distros should really evaluate how many of their users actually use older hardware.

I have huge soft spot for Vector linux which caters purely to the older hardware crowd

nightfrost · 2005-05-20 12:07:05

You can check this old thread out (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … did=267842)that I started a while back. Nevermind what I write in the first post since I've changed my opinion since then on many of the points, but the poll might be interesting

iphitus · 2005-05-20 12:18:20

nightfrost wrote:

You can check this old thread out (http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … did=267842)that I started a while back. Nevermind what I write in the first post since I've changed my opinion since then on many of the points, but the poll might be interesting

that poll is technically........ stuffed.

pentium3+4 are both i686 class processors. As for other, you probably have plenty of people with pentiums 1+2's, athlons or even 486's because they dont realise that their system fits into either i386 or i686.

nightfrost · 2005-05-20 14:13:46

I agree that people probably voted weirdly. What I was interested in (still am), is the amount of people who would be able to run i686-optimized OSes, contra those who must stick to lower (sure, i586 included). But reading the posts, I sure got the feeling that no one actually had anything lower than a pentium-2. Hmm... maybe one should start a new poll...

iphitus · 2005-05-20 21:38:22

if you start a new poll, dont get processor classes and brands mixed up.

phrakture · 2005-05-20 23:07:50

iphitus wrote:

if you start a new poll, dont get processor classes and brands mixed up.

don't include "i686" and "i386" in the poll - only proc types (p2/p3/p4)

however, don't do the poll here... everyone is guarenteed to have an i686

ozar · 2005-05-24 17:48:31

Not having tried the latest version of Gentoo, I decided to give it another spin this past weekend. I've successfully installed it 3 or 4 times in the past and always had good luck with it, but I do burn out on it very quickly due to the huge amount of time it takes to install, and keep updated and maintained.

Since Gentoo is all about optimization, I always do stage1 installs, and tweak the flag and USE variables. Still, it took most of the weekend to get it bootstrapped, all the files downloaded and compiled, and then tweaked for use.

After blowing my entire weekend on a single Gentoo install, I realized I could have installed Arch at least a dozen times and still have had some time left to do other things. Needless to say, I'm back to Arch and loving it.

Disclaimer: I did create an "image" of the new Gentoo install so I can easily go back and play with it again later.

citral · 2005-05-24 19:31:45

Bootstrapping is so pointless.
Compiling from source is one thing, but to compile basic packages like gcc from source is only torturing yourself - especially if it's your desktop machine and you just want to get going.

About compiling from source.
It is too simple to dismiss the claimed perfomance gain from compiling by source as a hoax. Gentoo is a /big/ distro, they can't all be lying when they say they notice performace gains.

Curiously though, I noticed no performance decline or whatsoever when moving to Arch.
I never noticed a performance boost in the first place when using Gentoo, but now I use Arch I'm not like: "damn I wish I could've bootstraped this system before installing".

phrakture · 2005-05-24 19:34:38

citral wrote:

but now I use Arch I'm not like: "damn I wish I could've bootstraped this system before installing".

LOL

Personally, I never saw performance gains with gentoo simply because something was always compiling in the background... gawd, OO took 2 days on an 866MHz box...

ozar · 2005-05-24 19:44:38

citral wrote:

I never noticed a performance boost in the first place when using Gentoo

Yeah, I've never felt any difference in speed and performance with Gentoo, either. I do know that it would take a hell of a lot of extra speed to make up for all those long compile times.

I still like using and playing with Gentoo, but's it's far too time intensive for me to use on a regular basis.

citral · 2005-05-24 20:09:45

phrakture wrote:

Personally, I never saw performance gains with gentoo simply because something was always compiling in the background... gawd, OO took 2 days on an 866MHz box...

A known experience for every (ex-)Gentoo user.

That's why I never updated my OpenOffice. I was still running some stone age version. I couldn't believe that after leaving my computer on for 2 days, it was still compiling! At some point the devs realised how insane it was and they introduced "openoffice-bin" for what it was worth.

What I never could, and still can't understand is 'emerge'. emerge is so incredibly slow. Archers thinking pacman sometimes is slow should try this sucker. I couldn't believe that such a big distro didn't fix it. I guess Gentoo users are used to slow installing, so they don't notice that 'emerge --search' takes just as long.

One thing I have to give to Gentoo are the ebuilds. A large availability of packages, and things are made easy for the devs too; no AUR, no TUs - just cp the ebuild baby!

One thing I thought I'd miss were the USE flags, but so far I haven't run into any problems or 'monster dependencies' yet.

luisfelipe · 2005-05-24 20:42:55

Well, two things :

1) emerge is kinda slow, but if you install esearch and eupdatedb, it's fast as hell. Dunno of anything similar to that in Arch (plus, the search on emerge was better than the search in pacman, but I know of some people who were working to improve this).
2) The biggest advantage of gentoo are the USE flags. Every package of your system is compiled the way you want it to be. No more, no less.

The amount of ebuilds available is huge, but the amount of PKGBUILDS available is also going to increase alot, so I don't think it's a problem.
And the amount of time it takes to bootstrap your system is irrelevant in my opinion, since you only need to do it once (that is, unless you keep switching distros every week, then it kinda matters).

citral · 2005-05-24 22:11:51

luisfelipe wrote:

Well, two things :
1) emerge is kinda slow, but if you install esearch and eupdatedb, it's fast as hell.

Well, you had to update the db after every sync, and the sync already took ages as is.
And it makes me wonder why they didn't implent it in emerge because esearch was around for ages.

Dunno of anything similar to that in Arch (plus, the search on emerge was better than the search in pacman, but I know of some people who were working to improve this).

What's wrong with the pacman's search? You can always use pajman, or get colored output.

2) The biggest advantage of gentoo are the USE flags. Every package of your system is compiled the way you want it to be. No more, no less.

Definately.
But so far I've not yet ran into a package where it wanted to pull in too many dependencies for my liking, like I had on Gentoo.
I'm not sure why. Perhaps I don't have as many packages installed as I had on my Gentoo install.

The amount of ebuilds available is huge, but the amount of PKGBUILDS available is also going to increase alot, so I don't think it's a problem.

Well, Gentoo has the obvious advantage of not needed to precompile packages.
That said, their way of submitting ebuilds is cumbersome compared to Arch Linux. We've got AUR, Gentoo uses bugzilla.

And the amount of time it takes to bootstrap your system is irrelevant in my opinion, since you only need to do it once (that is, unless you keep switching distros every week, then it kinda matters).

But still, those packages will get updated eventually as new versions roll out. The 100 ms speed increase for a month isn't worth it imho.

phrakture · 2005-05-24 22:41:47

wow citral... couldn't have said some of that better myself

The only thing I have to say about this "use flags are the best" attitude that people have is this:

Huge amounts of modern software supports optional add-ons. These addons are compiled in to the package, but if they are missing at runtime, it will bail out and not use that add-on.
For instance: KDE has some samba browsing functionality. If you don't have samba installed/setup and go to "smb://" you'll get something to the effect of "smb is not a registered protocol"

Now, let's say you initially decide "I don't need samba" - in arch, KDE is still compiled with the samba support, it just doesn't do anything because samba is missing from the host system. In gentoo, you'd setup "USE=-samba" and the support would be compiled out of KDE

Now, your friend comes over with his windows laptop and wants to share some pr0n over the LAN... what do you do now? In arch you "pacman -S samba" and KDE now works with it, but oops, your gentoo system was compiled with the ever awesome USE flags... time to recompile... sorry Jimmy, you'll have to come over again next Tuesday when KDE is done compiling...

People pimp out USE flags as if they're the greatest feature ever - but I say they're a hindrance.

luisfelipe · 2005-05-25 02:10:58

Well, I do like useflags. For quite some time I had problems with Arch's mplayer package. Couldn't use my capture card with it, framebuffer support was cut off on some versions, no libcaca support.
In gentoo, I can just tweak the useflags and have everything setup. In Arch, I had to :
a) contact the package maintainer, which I did, but it didn't help anything. Libcaca support wasn't added because it would mean another thing that mplayer would depend on.
b) Have my own version of mplayer on my local repository, which is what I finally did. And it sucked, because everytime there was a change to mplayer, I had to manually go and edit the PKGBUILD.

I don't think USEflags are a hindrance. In your example, you could just activate samba and leave it as it is. The thing is : I don't want samba support. Never did, never will. Whenever someone comes here with a windows laptop, I tell then to either install winscp and putty, or forget it.
heheh

>What's wrong with the pacman's search? You can always use pajman, or get colored output.

Pacman's search is way too simplistic. That's what pajman came to fix, and I was referring to it when I said that there were some people trying to improve that.

> That said, their way of submitting ebuilds is cumbersome compared to Arch Linux. We've got AUR, Gentoo uses bugzilla.

AUR is quite nice. Dunno how it's working after it went live, but I was one of the people who helped test it when it was in beta. But the bugzilla approach is quite a nice one I think. Sure, bugzilla is kinda hard to use the first time, but it is a really nice system (I like bugzilla better than the bug tracker being used by arch)

>But still, those packages will get updated eventually as new versions roll out. The 100 ms speed increase for a month isn't worth it imho.

Again, it's not about speed. Not about those 100 ms. And those packages don't get updated all together. I'm used to sync and update once a day (did this when I used arch too). So it's quite difficult for me to update more than 2 packages.
But if you don't update regularly, then you're gonna waste some time when you do. But even that can be spread through sessions.

All I'm saying is that I don't like people bashing other distros without reason. Like, saying gentoo sucks because compiling everything from source does not provide the huge speed improvement it was supposed to. The problem is gentoo is not about that. It's about configuration.
Sorry if you guys think I'm starting a war. I'm really not.

miqorz · 2005-05-25 03:47:58

Someone close this damn thread or atleast move it to off topic.

Who gives a fuck what distro someone uses? If people use arch. Let them. if someone wants to use gentoo, that's their problem.

There's no reason for this constant back and forth to keep going.

neither side will budge and it will just end up lame.

im so fucking sick of hearing about gentoo in general, i especially don't want to see this shit here.

citral · 2005-05-25 06:14:33

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Last edited by citral (2017-03-11 21:20:15)

Arch Linux

#26 2005-04-26 03:08:22

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#27 2005-04-26 05:10:51

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#28 2005-05-18 05:29:25

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#29 2005-05-18 06:01:05

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#30 2005-05-19 18:43:09

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#31 2005-05-20 06:36:47

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#32 2005-05-20 07:04:28

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#33 2005-05-20 11:42:32

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#34 2005-05-20 11:55:26

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#35 2005-05-20 12:07:05

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#36 2005-05-20 12:18:20

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#37 2005-05-20 14:13:46

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#38 2005-05-20 21:38:22

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#39 2005-05-20 23:07:50

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#40 2005-05-24 17:48:31

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#41 2005-05-24 19:31:45

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#42 2005-05-24 19:34:38

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#43 2005-05-24 19:44:38

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#44 2005-05-24 20:09:45

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#45 2005-05-24 20:42:55

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#46 2005-05-24 22:11:51

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#47 2005-05-24 22:41:47

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#48 2005-05-25 02:10:58

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#49 2005-05-25 03:47:58

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

#50 2005-05-25 06:14:33

Re: gentoo to arch - good to see

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