Chrome OS is made by Google to run specifically on the Chromebooks. I
don't think it is intended for general computing and there is no
enthusiast community around it like around other distros.
The closest cousin to Gentoo would be Funtoo. It used to be that Gentoo
Portage could only use rsync, while Funtoo Portage could use git which
is much faster, but since then Gentoo Portage has also gained the
functionality to use git for this purpose.
My biggest problem with Gentoo was not so much the time needed to
compile huge ebuilds like Firefox, Thunderbird, or Chromium, but that
say if you neglected doing updates for a while and then decided to start
again, then you'd have serious problems. This is because, at least the
way I understood it, after some time old ebuilds would get deleted from
the Portage servers to conserve space there, but some of those now
deleted ebuilds would still be needed as dependencies to do iterative
updates. The sure-way to resolve this problem would be to re-emerge the
whole @world set, which of course would take way-longer than just
Firefox, and might work differently because the '/etc/' configuration
schema might have changed.
In my case I had some weird problem either emerging some ebuild or
keeping an old version of an ebuild to keep the functionality or the
'/etc/' schema removed in the new versions. I just let things sit, and
moved on to other projects. But when later on I tried to go back to the
original issue, I had even more trouble because now I was even further
behind @world, and more ebuilds would not upgrade because of deleted
dependencies.
So to sum it up, my problem with Gentoo was that you could not just do
iterative updates after long periods of inactivity. You pretty much had
to emerge daily and if you had some problem then drop everything and fix
it right away, or else you'll fall even further behind and eventually
might have to rebuild @world. And so because constant attention
intervention and trial and error was required you could not just compile
huge ebuilds overnight and go about your life during the day.
The distro I would recommend to look at now is NixOS -- it is also
source-based, but if you have problems with one package that will not
prevent you from keeping the rest of the system up to date. Upstream
changes are pulled pretty regularly. And even though it is
source-based, you download most packages pre-compiled. However if you
want to you can tweak the source and re-compile locally. You can also
keep multiple versions of the same package. You also do not mess
directly with the '/etc/' files for individual packages, instead you
specify a global configuration "recipe" in
'/etc/nixos/configuration.nix', which is used to generate the
package-specific '/etc/' files. This layer of abstraction improves
reliability and allows easy config cloning across machines.
The down-side is that NixOS has a radically-different paradigm that
takes a while to wrap your head around, requires learning the Nix
Expression Language (which is radically-different too), and is not yet
that "mature" so theoretically things can break, but I would still
recommend it over Chrome OS.
-- Marat
On 6/7/21 1:10 AM, n952162 wrote:
I'm looking for a gentoo alternative and am surprised to see that google
chrome os is based on gentoo.
Does anybody have any experience with this?
Do they support multi-media and basic modern desktop capabilities? I
see that there's some concentration on a special browser, but I'd be
running Firefox and FVWM anyway.
Do they use /portage/ and source packages?
Do they push down every single upstream modification, like gentoo does,
or maybe have a bit of hysteresis?
I updated on May first and built firefox 78.10.*0*. 2+ days of
building. I updated on June first and built firefox 78.10.*1*. and
spent 2+ days building. I updated today because of the same old slot
collision problems I've run into over a year
dev-python/setuptools:0
dev-python/setuptools_scm:0
dev-python/toml:0
dev-python/certifi:0
dev-python/jinja:0
dev-python/markupsafe:0
and now, on the 7th, I'm building firefox 78.11. I just don't have the
time for this. It impacts my machines too much.
Yes, I know, there are binary versions, but if I wanted to use binary, I
wouldn't use gentoo. And anyway, there's always rust and gcc and ...
