A while ago I wrote about how I gave Gentoo a try. If you want you can read up on it here.
Spoiler: It didn't turn out that great, but I also said that I wasn't done and that I would give it a try again at some point.
Well that point was a few days ago, so now I'll report on what I learned. First off I got my hands on a Thinkpad X230, which is actually a fairly recent model compared to the Thinkpads I've been dealing with in the past (T23 and T41).
I got it used, but in a very good condition, with a docking station for 200 € (~233.85$), which is an okay price I'd say since electronics tend to be a little more expensive over here than in America.
Here's the other specs:
- 8gb ram
- i5-3320M (2.60 GHz)
- 180 gb ssd
So since I now had this new machine I used it to give Gentoo another try. After spending half a day installing it I was finally ready to start setting up all the programs. The installation itself went smoothly (Except for Grub, which tends to have some issues on thinkpads, since they only look for uefi boot files in one specific location) to my own surprise.
Even compiling the kernel went way faster than I expected (I guess the i5 isn't that bad).
And then I wanted to install a web browser.
Gentoo is a source based distribution, which means that almost any software you want to install has to be compiled first. I already knew that but didn't give it much thought, but web browsers need a javascript engine (Or whatever that's called) to support javascript. And that stuff takes ages to compile.
I first tried to install surf, technically one of the lightest graphical browsers you can get (Seriously it's just a window that shows whatever website you passed as an argument), but it depends on Webkit which contains javascript stuff.
I googled and apparently it's known to take notoriously long to compile even on high end machines. In the Gentoo forums people said that even with a recent i7 cpu they let it update overnight.
This is when I decided to ditch Gentoo. Having to leave your system run over night just to update software is not only a waste of energy, but also ridiculous. I really admire anyone who can use Gentoo for anything except very specific purposes, that only require a small amount of software which is easy to maintain and update.
With binary based distributions (aka. almost all of them) installing something like surf takes a matter of minutes (depending on your internet connection maybe even less). The beauty of this is, that someone else will spend the time and resources compiling the binaries, so you don't have to. It's more efficient and easy. Of course some people will claim that unless you compile it yourself it might contain malicious code, but no one ever even checks the code anyways. If it's open source everyone just assumes it's safe.
After all that I went back to arch, the installation went a lot faster but that's partially because I'm more familiar with it. Now I can at least say that I have installed Gentoo, configured and compiled my very own special kernel (Not really I just went with what the wiki said plus some drivers for thinkpad) and I can safely say: It's a meme and not worth it.
Nonetheless I'd suggest that everyone should try it out before jumping to conclusions, I did and found out for myself that it's not worth the hassle. I don't want to spend all my time maintaining the machine. The best distro for that would probably be debian since Arch tends to break on some updates, but for now this'll do.
And as always
install /g/entoo