It was announced late last year that Gentoo is now offering binary versions of their packages. I’ve always had an interest in Gentoo, but the need to compile everything has always turned me away from it. I run Arch because it gives me the sense that I have more control of my system, when compared to other distros like Ubuntu, for example, but it still keeps things simple enough for day-to-day use. That being said, when compared to Gentoo, Arch is still rather restrictive, so if there exists an alternative that offers Arch’s simplicity, and also the potential for customization of Gentoo, then I would gladly switch. I am wondering if Gentoo’s new binary offerings fit this description. From what I understand, it removes the need to set use flags, and to compile any packages, but it still allows you to maintain full control over your system.
So, in summary, is a binary Gentoo functionally equivelant to Arch Linux, but with more control over the system? I would like to know more about the following:
- Does the OS installation change, and, if so, how?
- Does package installation, updates, and maintenance change, and, if so, how?
- Do system updates change, and, if so, how?
- Do you lose any potential control over the system when using the binaries, rather than compiling from source, and, if so, what?
- Are there any differences in system stability? Can I expect things to break more readily on a binary Gentoo compared to Arch Linux?
Just a disclaimer: I have never used Gentoo – all my knowledge is second hand, or from skimming documentation out of curiosity. Please correct any inacuracies that I may have in my knowledge.
This has been answered a bit already but:
Perhaps, if that’s how you view the world. I’d argue that it’s better as I’ve never seen Gentoo ship a version of curl that broke Portage…
You basically unpack a tarball, select a kernel, install a bootloader, and go. It’s no different to before except that you can optionally choose to enable the use of binary packages.
If comparing to arch, you use portage to handle that but the concept is the same.
Gentoo has a great system for managing configuration changes when a package updates a file that you’ve customised.
This question doesn’t make much sense to me. What is a “system update”? Isn’t that just updating all of your packages at once?
Yes and no. If you customise your USE flags the binary won’t be suitable and instead portage will build the package as you requested it
Hahahahaha. Hahahahahaha. Hahaha. Ha.
Arch is notorious for shipping barely tested software to have the higher version number in their repo.
Gentoo enables users to select the stable or testing path, on a per package basis, so you have to opt into packages that haven’t been well tested and even those are typically better tested than arch.
I would think syncing the repos and emerging the @world set would be considered a system update. But I guess that is a bit different from how most distros do it.
Aha, would you mind elaborating? That sounds like quite the issue for Pacman to break its own dependencies.
Ah okay, I was under the impression that the installation didn’t require installing from source with the new binary system – I thought it was more akin to Arch’s installation where you just select your kernel binary in Pacman, then download, and install.
Would you have any resources/documentation for me to look into this more?
I misworded my original post – I was referring to things like updating the kernel. I thought that maybe the kernel would be a binary, so it would not have to be recompiled like how I would assume it usually does.
This sounds very appealing to me, but I must admit that these sorts of configurations do seem like they would be mildly daunting to juggle on a production machine.
There are options for binary kernels, just so you are aware.
As for documentation related to configuration of
portage
and/etc/portage/make.conf
, I would, of course, be remiss to not point you to the Gentoo Handbook. The wiki contributors do really great work and the community is generally quite welcoming and open to implementation-specific questions.