What does it take to rehab from distrohopping?
After so long I think the answer is to find, not the perfect distribution but the distribution whose scabies you like, because as the saying goes "Scabies with pleasure, it doesn't itch." What do you think?
After so long, I found mine. I realized that I just finished a whole year without switching distro. One year using Calculate Linux. A distro that I have talked about before and that has now been so comfortable to use that I did not see any need to change distro.
Calculate is nothing more than a Gentoo done and Out of the Box, intended for the intermediate user who wants to use Portage but doesn't want to start by compiling the kernel, graphical environment, etc. It is made to be used as LiveDVD and what comes there is installed. Chromium, Libreoffice, KDE, which was the LiveDVD environment (there is also XFCE and the rest are for servers and etc.), even Skype which at first seemed superfluous to me and then I ended up using (it still seems superfluous that it comes pre-installed) . Then it was a matter of learning a few emerge commands, while also having a wonderful tool like eix, to search for packages and update repositories. Another wonderful tool is the dispatch-conf to update the configuration files, after an emerge with –autounmask-write.
With all this, what is the scabies that does not itch? The answer is the Chromium update. It lowers you two hundred-odd megs of code and it takes me two hours to compile everything (I have 8 processors). The rest takes a short time. Then there may not be a program in the repositories that is in Arch, Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora, but I rarely had to install a program by compiling it manually and not through emerge.
To see readers. Do you have a similar story where you like scabies and you want to jump from distro to distro? I'd show you a screenshot, but I'm too lazy to care about the look (I mean, my screen is ugly). The screen you see is LiveDVD with Xfce.
Is there a better speed when compiling the programs yourself or is it not significant?
I have the same question D:
I would not know how to answer you, because my notebook is a machine.
Yes, it shows. It may not be huge, but it shows, just as what is most noticeable is the consumption of resources.
I answer your question @Miguelinux being a Gentoo user for some time:
Is there a better speed when compiling the programs yourself or is it not significant?
The answer is: Yes it shows, but that depends a lot on how you configure your make.conf and the USEs that you are going to activate the system. The first is a file that allows you to configure everything necessary for emerge to do its magnificent job of compiling, fixing dependencies and making every package fit your processor and needs.
In my particular case my compilation options for my simple Athlon X2 are:
CFLAGS = »- O2 -march = native -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer»
This means that my packages are compiled only and specifically for my processor (Native which in my case is K8-SSE3). Bringing it to another processor whose instructions are different (eg Core Duo) may lead to you not being able to execute the binary that I have compiled. The others are options to speed up compilation a bit and decrease the size of the final binaries, which results in less space occupied by the OS and in a much shorter load time (of ms actually although it may be more depending on the configuration from the binary). This part can really do a lot of magic, and those who are used to using Debian and have switched to Archlinux will know what I'm talking about. As you know, in Debian (32-bit) everything is compiled for i386, which is a set of instructions that is almost 30 years old and is obviously very outdated, however, in Debian they use it for compatibility reasons, being the only thing compiled in i686, the kernel and even so there are other variants such as 486. In ArchLinux (32 bits) this is different, all its packages are compiled for i686, and that is one of the reasons why many who have just arrived at Arch from Debian they notice that immense change of speed, not only in the startup of the OS, but in its level of response in general.
The second is the USEs, which are nothing more than keywords that allow you to activate or deactivate features of the packages you are going to install. This is the «Gentoo magic option», I can make my system only support certain features and ignore others, making the compiled packages not only much lighter than those with all their features active, but also running more fast and consume less memory. In my case, the USEs that I have active are those detailed in the following link:
http://paste.desdelinux.net/5165
With that, I have a system with support for ALSA, pulseaudio, vdpau, glamor, egl, firefox, dbus and ffmpeg. It is definitive, a complete and functional desktop, both on the Web and in multimedia.
During the boot both Debian and Gentoo behave quite similar, OpenRC is a little slower (a script-based boot), but the difference between boot is not greater than 5 seconds, and the truth is that I have not tested the parallelization of OpenRC what it should make things a little faster, something that being OpenRC as it is seems like an achievement.
Differences between binaries?
Just to give an example, my mpv binary is only 1,3 Mb, and Debian SID's is 1,7 Mb, and Gentoo's can use vdpau output for r600 without freezing your system, not only that, but playing a 1080p MKV video normally the processor usage does not exceed 20% with all the system load and several programs running at the same time (Firefox with 9 tabs, SpaceFM, a couple of urxvtc and several demons). It is more at the time of writing this my processor use is 6% and running all the programs already mentioned.
http://imgur.com/2OZNXoF
https://imgur.com/eugSDyU (MKV 1080p)
Long my answer, but I think I have been quite clear 😀
Greetings.
What curiosity does Gentoo cause me, one of the few that I have not tested, I have been quiet sheltered on Archlinux, I am worried about the time to have the optimal system I have many programs installed. on a Core i5-2400 and 8gb Ram to see if I cheer up ..
ps what WM do you use?
@ Bitl0rd I use awesome wm.
Thank you very much for such a good answer and nothing extensive when you are interested and it is well explained. Well, I am left with the compilation bug, if not all the programs I use the most.
Now I start the holidays so it would be interesting to configure a distro in the most optimal way that it is capable so that it stays as long as possible on my laptop, I am not distrohopping but I do not like having to reinstall every six months so a rolling release it would be very nice ... Antergos style.
The answer is ambiguous in itself…! currently, processors have characteristics that mitigate what you comment on the performance of a program compiled on its own or compiled by a development team with a general target.
I think the closest thing would be "It depends"
I use gentoo on Powerpc's and although the equipment is usually 9 years old it is not a fundamental factor for me ..! I basically look for flexibility which is what allows me to have a current program running on a long-standing platform. !
Not all users are the same, some will need features that others do not and I think it is the principle that you must follow if you want to have a really efficient system. In other words, "Only add what you need when you need it and under the conditions you have"
Yes, a lot, I remember back in the days of a duron 1800 that I had, the difference between using (whatever distro) as it came and using it compiled, it was a lot, with the kernel it was only noticeable. Now, in for example a phenom II 945 the difference is really invaluable, since it is a powerful CPU in itself, the same as the modern core i5-7, so for me it is not justified (unless your pc requires a lot of power) compile if you have a modern powerful CPU
A good distribution to be able to surf the Net, read digital press, write or listen to good music, view photos or videos, could very well be Debian, Ubuntu or even Xubuntu. And why not LMDE in any of its versions? Now, if one wants a nice or elegant distro and that, in addition, does all of the aforementioned without problems, I think the best would be Manjaro Xfce in its latest version. I find it great adding a few well-crafted icons. But if, in addition to all this, a leading distribution is required according to our processor and graphics card, the best thing would be to reach Arch, OpenSUSE or Arch Gnome-Shell. . . But no. . . I am looking and searching, jumping from one distribution to another in search of perfection, until finally I realize that perfection does not exist because those who make the distributions are human beings, like us, of flesh and blood. In short, they are not perfect either and they themselves try to seek perfection, but I repeat, perfection does not exist. Or if?
Well, I've been delighted with LXLE for a couple of years. The reason is very simple: it can be installed on practically any PC (desktop or laptop), be it an old Pentium 3 or a brand-new next-generation i7, without having to bother with drivers. Of all the distros I've tried, it's the only one that never gives me a problem.
Once the system has been installed, everything else can be changed. That is one of the great assets of GNU / Linux.
Apart from that, being based on Ubuntu it has a huge base of applications available without fighting with compilations or with the damn Alien (great tool, but that works when you want) ... but being much lighter than this, and even than Lubuntu using its same desktop.
I have already installed it for two "windowseros" users without any technical knowledge and they are both delighted.
It is very true and that also happens with operating systems, there are people who are very comfortable with their system even if it is closed source and that is because not everyone likes or it is necessary to modify things to their system and that is the important thing that you are comfortable and comfortable with your system there is more than what the competition does or not
I have already commented on it on other occasions, using gentoo testing from April 2008 to date.
Remembering what made me change distro before gentoo ... it's simple, you want a certain package in binary distros and you die when you can't find it or when it is but an anti-flood version (hello, debian).
When you can install whatever you want with a few commands, even if you have to wait for it to compile ... it has everything you need ... unfortunately in the comfort of any binary distro that is impossible.
Distrohopping comes from not having what you want, then you jump to another distro where you have what you were looking for ... but now you lack what you had with the previous one.
Greetings and continue emerging.
Since I broke up with Mandrake, I've only stayed with Debian and until now, I haven't changed it for the world.
Well, I'm still looking for the "Holy Grail" ...
You will not find it .. !! In my opinion, if you are not determined to stay with a single distro and develop all your activities within the ecosystem of that distro, I highly doubt that you will be able to reach the conclusion that there is something that fully accommodates your needs. ! Perhaps (and in a personal way) Gentoo has given me all the flexibility I need to be able to tackle everything from the most complex to the simplest tasks with complete control over them. !
Let's see, let me explain: Until recently, after a year and a half of use, I believed that Manjaro Linux was the cure for my "scabies" (in fact, it is) and I had determined that this would be my main distro (I have used Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc etc.), however I face the problem of not being able to synchronize the repositories with either PACMAN or AUR, since I live in Cuba and through a 1k modem that barely manages to download 56 , 3,5 Kb / sec on average is totally impossible. The same thing happens to me with other interesting distros like Arch, Gentoo, Fedora and even the BSD. I can only solve this problem with Debian / Ubuntu because here it is easier to find mirrors or download the repos of these distros, but it happens that Debian / Ubuntu already bores me ... not that I find anything wrong with them, I simply no longer find them an incentive. And here I am lurching back and forth between Debian and Ubuntu, but with a tremendous ... "itch." * _ *
I used Sabayón for almost 2 years and I found my scabies although sometimes I try others but only live, for now I am satisfied with this distro and very comfortable too, so I understand a lot what you say !!! Cheers
My "stop distrohopping" was KaOS, that is my scabies that I like, in November I will celebrate 2 years with it.
I am happy as an archer. But Gentoo is tempting me. Let's see if I find time ...
After 15 years with gnu / linux, as an intense user since 2006, and a fierce distrohop but since 2011 the fault of a whimsical Toshiba laptop, and also as a geek vice (Distrowatch is almost my spiritual guide), at the beginning of this year I got to the point After considering an establishment, after spending a lot of time with Stella (a very complete CentOS remix for desktop), I felt that I needed more, an inner call.
And so I came to the moment of taking an iso from a sacred distro, LA distro, which is not live, which seems to have a complex installation (the same as it always had), and whose graphic environments have not even the slightest modification ... and with a package system that does not resolve dependencies.
SLACKWARE, yes, gnu / linux in its purest form. Digital love.
And I had to learn to deal with slackbuilds, sbopkg, Alien, Slacky repositories, etc ... Then to polish that sooo basic Xfce, to use both the console, to look for tutorials and to consult, even to reason more when use the commands. And believe it or not, to feel every day a unique feeling of happiness and tranquility when I turned on my computer and saw Lilo's screen, "Slackware Linux". Slack is Linux, it is proud to be it, and it does not pretend to be more. Not so many annoying updates, nor too many programs. Stability, security and confidence that everything works, because it just works.
But one day… one weekend… a pretty girl named Antergos appeared, and it was a temptation. A temptation that ended up breaking the partition table of the disk and making a stew of partitions and lost data. Without much time or patience I went to look for it, the only Debian, within hours of releasing its stable version 8. 3 minutes and 92C later it was discarded.
And that night I thought about her, missed her, dreamed about her. I realized that he is the love of my life. The next day I asked his forgiveness and swore fidelity forever.
I love, love and adore Slackware, no distro has even close to its personality and strength, not even the identification with its philosophy. I adore Patrick Volkerding, a brilliant mind, humble and a bit grumpy like Linus himself. To Alien Bob who gives the extra touch of quality with his work to such a masterpiece of software engineering. And to a wonderful community from all over the world, with extremely faithful and caring people.
Daily, after booting, when I log in, while running startx, I smile and feel at home.
Greetings!.
slack makes no distinction (or patrick's grunt if you will) between free and non-free software.
WRONGG! .. discarded!
The purest and at the same time simple love is in a minimal debian ... it is submissive and you do what you want. It only comes with a little panties on.
Distrohopping Kubuntu 14.04 cured me, although I had a relapse updating to 15.03: -B but the truth is that both are wonderful.
Thanks for your article, it has been very interesting, but I would like to know if you have tried Sabayon, and if so, could you tell us why you like Calculate more than Sabayon?
It's a similar debate to Antergos vs Manjaro that I think is interesting.
And as you say, everyone chooses the scabies that itch the least, I'm simply interested in the motivations for the final choice between two very similar distributions.
Sabayon can be used as a gentoo, with the addition of having precompiled packages that would avoid those 2 hours of chromium compilation, but something must have less convincing than Calculate and I would like to know.
Sure I tried sabayon for 4 months 3 years ago. With sabayon I have no problems except that it is much more out of the box than Calculate, and if there is a version of a program that appears stable in gentoo, it is not necessarily in the sabayon repos. I remember that because in that period I asked them for a more recent version of qupzilla (in sabayon there was 1.1.8 and I asked them for 1.3.5) and they brought it because I asked them.
Get a job
+1
1 +!
I'm already cured haha
And also a technical / university degree (if that is not enough for you, a @ hij @).
Certainly a child cures you more from distrohopping even than work or a good girlfriend.
=)
if it is a cure, and depending on the job until you stop using the pc / laptop
haha, if it is a vice that he gave us all at the time. and sometimes we fall back on it ...
Lieaaaaa !!! That doesn't work either !!! I have a house, a husband, a son, a job… and every month I have to flog myself to not change distro !!!!
I definitely have to go to DHA (Distrohopping Anonymous). ^ _ ^
Wow @linuxgirl, but your problem is practically serious. : v
I will be curious. Do you work with your PC? for me changing my main distro means having to reinstall all workstations, databases, configure apache, SSL (the configuration varies between distros).
On the laptop (which is my emergency machine) I don't change much either since I am lazy to configure everything again.
And the truth as my environment is really personalized right now (i3 + emacs + firefox + moc) the changes between distros (and versions) bring little for me.
Sometimes I try other OS like Haiku or Plan9 in VirtualBox.
Excellent distro, simply wonderful, powerful, extremely stable. So much so that I have been using it for 7 months without having any intention of changing. Amazing. Highly recommended.
Mish, good to hear from someone who uses Calculate.
I use Funtoo, and it does have quite a few forks relative to Gentoo. I thought at some point to go to Calculate, but I still have my doubts, apart from the fact that it bothers me to migrate everything again. In Funtoo, for example, there is an eselect tool to choose the flags for your processor, for example.
What bothers me about Funtoo has to do precisely with the forks. Some are behind; others, advanced, apart from not having good support for cross-compiling. I mean, it does, but for GCC, I have to resort to Gentoo ebuilds. It is important to me when I work for Arduino. So far, that matter is shoved.
Sharing your experience is appreciated.
I used it for a few months and then I switched to Gentoo, for two things… one, you can't use systemd in calculate-linux, the other is that it uses a lot of binaries…. that's why I install Funtoo xD.
Currently I have been Gentoo testing for months ... yesterday I deleted Arch because the same desktop as in Gentoo did not suit me.
I encourage you to try Gentoo….
Oysters 2 hours to compile Chromium with 8 Nuclei ???? Well, it took me an hour.
You can mount portage in ram so that it does not bottleneck you that the hard disk is doing.
I only have binaries for firefox, libreoffice, icedtea, oracle jdk and thunderbird.
And chromium actually took me an hour and a half.
Thu Jun 25 22:30:31 2015 >>> www-client / chromium-43.0.2357.130
merge time: 1 hour, 32 minutes and 13 seconds.
If you use Calculate, the purple ebuilds are binary and have quite a few ... To not have binaries, you have to be in a profile other than calculate.
salu2
@Brutico July 8, 2015 6:29 PM
With 8 cores and take that long for that chromium?
I have 8 cores (FX8350) but I only use firefox, on average it takes 9-11 minutes to compile and install.
I have 16G ram and created a 10G ram disk for the emerge / var / tmp / portage temp mount point
So I have in my / etc / fstab
none / var / tmp / portage tmpfs nr_inodes = 1M, size = 10240M 0 0
$ genlop -t firefox | tail -n3
Tue Jul 7 15:59:48 2015 >>> www-client / firefox-39.0
merge time: 11 minutes and 19 seconds.
With that, he no longer plays the album for the compilation temps…. It literally flies.
I have the same processor ... and it takes 10 minutes. It's the Chromium it takes about 50 minutes.
It's the magic of compiling in RAM memory 😀
I think I went down to distroshopping with Archlinux, it is the distro to which I have spent the most time and to which I am most grateful because I learned a lot. I have to install a Gentoo to keep learning but my laptop is not powerful enough to waste time compiling.
Now with the company's laptop I decided to try Fedora and it is a distro that I liked a lot, especially in the security section I find it very interesting. It is a distro to which I am learning a lot and those concepts can be applied in other things.
The truth is, you stung me to try it, and I don't dislike it. I chose the KDE flavor, but I use HDMI sound through NVIDIA graphics and sometimes I start and everything is perfect, and other times it does not detect the sound.
And that annoys me a lot. I think I'll go back to my dear antergos, in which just setting the audio no longer gives any problems
You are not the owner of several humorous posts from debian and in favor of systemd?
«We are opposed to systemd. At the moment, we use udev, because it does not require dependencies on systemd. Alexander Tratsevskiy (Calculate).
I will use OpenRC in Calculate (truly superior, portable, cross-platform and parallelized), but I will propagandize for the mob to use systemd. Do what I say but not what I do.
Excellent observation
"Do what I say, not what I do" typical saying, refuge of people who are not authentic.
Meh, I really wasn't looking for much.
My pc is an HP compact small from factor, a shitty old pc, but it always ran with winxp and it didn't give much trouble, I no longer remember how or when I switched to linux.
I tried a few distros, linux mint (I didn't like it), lubuntu, open suse I was going to try it but I had problems with the installation and I gave up between sobs. I tried Ubuntu and I cried even more when I saw THAT SHIT APP LAUNCHER THAT GIVES CANCER AND DIARRHEA. So I ended up trying Xubuntu, and I'm still with it. The truth is I'm very happy, but being addicted to video games one day I put Windows back on. It turns out that I put Windows 7 64-bit on the PC and at first it was fine but it started to lag. Then I wanted to switch to winxp and the installation was screwed. I had a very bad time trying to boot win xp desde linux, but I had to emulate windows to boot windows. Because apparently it costs an egg to boot win xp desde linux although you can with 7 8 and so on.
Crying and crying .. xD in the end I managed to boot a version called windows wolf 3, which turned out to be a shit full of errors, then I put original xp on it, and oh no, a virus ... I had forgotten its existence after using linux xD so in the end I said to myself ... fuck games, I'm going back to linux.
Tried makulu, because xfce desktop suits my little pc shit very well, it's light but not as ugly as lfce
I realized that even though my processor is 64-bit, my pc is too shitty to run 64-bit distros, so I put makulu on both versions and noticed a big difference ... but unfortunately it was still slower than with my beloved Xubuntu.
In short, you have to use a distro that makes your pc as happy as you XD.
And Xubuntu for me is perfect, although I would like to use other distros (I tried ubuntu studio and I think it is Xubuntu with applications, period) there is none that works better than xubuntu on my pc, since it is a bit limited and with this it goes from Wonderful. I really recommend it to anyone, maybe it is a bit obvious that you want to use other distros having a more powerful pc, but I think that this distro is perfectly capable of doing a lot of things without problems and that you can also improve it through codecs, plugins and others
The truth is I tried many distros perhaps the most known as ubuntu that at that time my laptop could never load it, lnuxmint which was great with KDE but I got curious with fedora and had many interesting things but I missed my linuxmint when I returned to linuxmint I told myself Mind you I didn't learn anything so to mess it up a bit I decided to Debian Testing with KDE to the point that today 3 years later I only have debian with gnome on my new laptop which for me is a monster core i7 8gb ram 1TB HDD and 256 VRAM enough to work libreoffice calc, QGIS, check facebook and empathy to chat besides that I play regnum.
And the truth is that I do not take advantage of the 8GB of ram of my laptop as much as I consume in 1GB with QGIS and Regnum at the same time.