Thinkpad P15v gen 3 running arch. I played around with fedora a bit but it was boring. I got a working gentoo install running but that was too complicated, so I settled on arch.

    • zewm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      3 months ago

      Gentoo is fun to play around with but is not a daily driver at all.

  • lemming741@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    3 months ago

    I tried to install cachyos this weekend. Immediately broken due to rdseed problem with sddm. Turns out the year of the Linux desktop is a lot like the year of the Linux desktop.

    • addie@feddit.uk
      3·
      3 months ago

      Yeah. You know the first time you install Arch (btw), and you realise you’ve not installed a working network stack, so you need to reboot from the install media, remount your drives, and pacstrap the stuff you forgot on again? Takes, like, three minutes every time? Imagine that, but you’ve got a kernel compile as well, so it takes about half an hour.

      Getting Gentoo so that it’ll boot to a useful command line took me a few hours. Worthwhile learning experience, understand how boot / the initramfs / init and the core utilities all work together. Compiling the kernel is actually quite easy; understanding all the options is probably a lifetime’s work, but the defaults are okay. Setting some build flags and building ‘Linux core’ is just a matter of watching it rattle by, doesn’t take long.

      Compiling a desktop environment, especially a web browser, takes hours, and at the end, you end up with a system with no noticeable performance improvements over just installing prebuilt binaries from elsewhere.

      Unless you’re preparing Linux for eg. embedded, and you need to account for basically every byte, or perhaps you’re just super-paranoid and don’t want any pre-built binaries at all, then the benefits of Gentoo aren’t all that compelling.