this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo still exists 🙂
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
I use puppy from time to time. Works well.
I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo's mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.
How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.
They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.
Gentoo has cflags and cross-building
Nix has Nix configs
I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it's no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.
I'm tracking now.
The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn't like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.
I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn't have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.
My first real job was forklift driving on a warehouse dock, maybe we crossed paths
That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal's ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.
but stability isn't something that would drive a gentoo user away either.
a lot of the draw of gentoo from what I saw was being able to configure everything down to how it gets compiled. it's simple to apply a patch to a package before it gets built or maintain a custom kernel config in nixos, as well as all the advantages of declarative os
Gentoo's forums are quite active and it's one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
DSL is basically an Antix spin now ( which is itself basically just Debian ).