[haolez]

I've done this once. I got a laptop from a new company that was really shitty, but I had hopes that running Gentoo with some nasty CFLAGS would make it usable. However, the thing would heat a lot when compiling the base system and would crash in the middle of the installation.

Fair enough! I put it in the fridge and ran the installation from there. It concluded without issues and the laptop was MUCH faster than with a "normal" Linux distro. (I don't think this kind of big performance difference holds up on modern machines though).

[Scene_Cast2]

Did condensation not pose a problem? Not just immediate shorts, but perhaps corrosion and the laptop dying earlier than expected.

[eru]

You get condensation when you move from a cold environment to a hot one. When your piece of equipment is colder than the surrounding air's dew point.

So you need to worry about condensation, when you take the equipment out of the fridge at the end.

(Where I live now, our dew point is typically at 24C throughout the day. So anything at or below that temperature collects water. That's about 75F.)

[mattclarkdotnet]

Fridges are very low humidity environments.

[__MatrixMan__]

It's the humidity of the kitchen that gets you though.

[Moru]

I guess that is meaningful in a location with higher ambient temperatures. Here we just open up the computer a bit and aim a big table-fan at it for better cooling :-)

[eru]

What's a 'normal' Linux distro for comparison?

Do you mean one that ships binaries, or perhaps one that also enables a GUI by default?

[pjerem]

Well you know the old adage : Gentoo is compiled for your computer in its condition so that’s why it’s fast. Here the Gentoo was baked in excellent atmospheric condition so that’s why it was an awesome install, configured for coolness :)

[haolez]

I think it was Debian with i386 packages. Compiling with Gentoo targeting my CPU and not a generic i386 machine made things much faster for such a crappy device.

[eru]

That makes sense.

It's just that for recent distributions, if you have a reasonably common and modern CPU, you already get most of the optimizations you need in the pre-compiled packages.