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by genchu
1218 days ago
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I finally installed Gentoo last year for the first time. I am pleased to say that Gentoo will be my distro of choice for the foreseeable future. One of the best aspects of Gentoo is how easy it is to understand its working parts (portage, openrc), and to customize/modify a working system. This is in contrast to, e.g., Debian/Ubuntu, which I used for years, and which bring in a lot more complexity to do the same things. I'll also admit that while the theory of Nix always seemed to hold promise, I've never actually went through with installing it as a distro on a base system. To me, the premise of Nix---essentially, that it can provide an abstraction of pristine system state transitions---doesn't seem to mesh with the reality of physical computer systems; which is to say, state and mutability are not bugs, but features of your computer. On source-based/"ports"-style package management: I think the way to approach portage is to put yourself in the role of a sysadmin in charge of maintaining a set of Gentoo installations. So, if you want binary packages, you will need to ensure it is set up right yourself (possibly using portage's own binpkg tools, or some other way). There's a certain DIY/rugged-individualism to this approach; but the design and implementation of Gentoo enable and encourage opening the engine hood. |
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Similar thoughts about Nix too. Messed around with it in limited ways but it's not a good match for how I like to run my systems and I don't find the extra layer of complexity to be a good enough trade-off.
Frankly I am a bit surprised that I am still on Gentoo after all these years (decades), you'd think that something better[1] would come along. But if it's out there I have yet to find it.
[1] ...better for my personal preferences and use cases