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Discussion on: I'm Letting the Internet Decide the OS of My New System

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hypoon profile image
Hypoon

Using it might make people think I'm a Gentoo user

Hey... what's that supposed to mean?! Do Gentoo users have a stigma? I've been using Gentoo for more than a decade... I want to know if I'm part of a problem! :-P

On a more serious note, I've never used Sabayon, but those benchmarks seem very unfair. There's something to be said for out-of-the-box behavior, but out-of-the-box Gentoo defeats the purpose of Gentoo. Instead, I would skip benchmarking Gentoo and assume it could match other distributions' benchmarks after a bit of tweaking.

Gentoo's biggest strength is its biggest weakness. If you don't or can't spend the time tweaking it, it is not the right distribution.

I would also be cautious of benchmarking distributions inside virtual machines. Some distributions could be optimized for running on virtual machines, and that's probably not what you're trying to measure. I would suggest a live-cd or live-usb if you don't want to interfere with your main storage.

I apologize if I'm way off-mark. I got here from my Google feed, so I might be missing some additional context (oops).

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jeremycmorgan profile image
Jeremy Morgan

No, you're not off mark at all. VMs aren't the best true benchmark but I wanted to combine them all side by side to get a rough idea of how they compare. They're all pretty similar to each other in performance, and unless you're doing a lot of rendering/compiling you may not even notice. The only thing I do often is video rendering so that extra optimization may help save me time over the long run.

As for the Gentoo user joke, I have no idea what it's like now but the community was really toxic when I was using it. (early to late 2000s). People asking for help would just get slaughtered by the groups and in a way, it made ME a better Gentoo user! I would go out of my way to research and try to help the person with a problem while everyone was dumping on them so I learned too.

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hypoon profile image
Hypoon

That's very interesting. I've never had that experience with the Gentoo community, even in that specific time period. I never posted much on the forums (I primarily used IRC when seeking help) so perhaps that might explain the different experiences.

People who make a community toxic are often unaware that the community is toxic. I still hope and believe that I did not contribute to that perception, though.

Perhaps I'll be a little more cautious waving my Gentoo flag now. Regardless of the past, I hope that few people experience a toxic Gentoo community today...

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jeremycmorgan profile image
Jeremy Morgan

Yeah it's mostly a joke and a bit of a meme out there these days. I tried to do my part to make it not toxic.

But on the original topic, Gentoo was a lot of fun for me, I found the compiling all the time to be less and less worth it when I wanted to get stuff done. Has that improved these days? I know with CPUs being what they are it has to be better. I remember spending entire weekends compiling a Gentoo build, then I would set up long compiles overnight for updates.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

I was a Gentoo noob in those days and I never found any toxic community, thay where very strict tho, all already answered question got a link to the related question and to the forum guidelines just before the post was closed or just a RTFM. I guess that may be considered rude but that's why those days no other forum got close to que quality of Gentoos. Arch on the other hand, I've seen users making valid questions berated. Non-pure Arch users being almost insulted and don't even dare to mention systemd, you'll get dozens of toxic comments. As you mentioned Gentoo made try before asking, read the guidelines and documentation first and always be polite, you are asking for someone else time after all. Arch tought me, Arch is great, wiki is awesome, don't bother with the forums. Lucky me after years of Gentoo, when I used Arch never need the forum.

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jeremycmorgan profile image
Jeremy Morgan

I don't hang out in the Arch forums either. In fact, many Linux forums are toxic and full of smug people that bash newbies.

I don't understand it, I consider myself an advanced Linux user. Been using it since the mid-90s. I've run Gentoo, Arch, and even Linux from Scratch. I've never felt the need to use that as a reason to one-up someone or make them feel inferior.

I'm just the opposite, the more I learn the more I want to drag newbies into my world. So you like Linux Mint? Cool, let me show how ____ works. I don't get the "be smug and condescending" thing.

To each their own I guess.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

"The problem with climbing stepping on others, is that no matter how high you get, you're not getting any taller"
-- don't remember

Starts when people wants to be better than the others, what follows is realizing that improve oneself is way harder than bring everyone else down.

Sadly as far as I've seen, forums from more "noob friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu, are friendlier but their answers are usually useless, with much of click here and click there, sadly 2 versions ahead, the button is not there anymore nor the tab nor the menu. Very little background of the problems, very little about the cause.

Anyhow, I've heard a lot of new people with Linux having a great time and a very good experience with communities that don't seem to exist in other platforms. Maybe we are getting old and bitter :D and our vision is tinted with years of ocassional bad experiences, we sometimes tend to remember those more than the good ones.

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hypoon profile image
Hypoon • Edited

But on the original topic, Gentoo was a lot of fun for me, I found the compiling all the time to be less and less worth it when I wanted to get stuff done. Has that improved these days?

Yes and no. On my machines, I only have to worry about recompiling very large packages (Libreoffice, for example). Many of those monsters have binaries in-tree, though. If you do want to compile them, it still takes a long time (hours). I definitely recommend libreoffice-bin because I can't justify spending that much time compiling something that will never feel super fast anyway.