this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
130 points (97.8% liked)
Linux
48687 readers
409 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.
Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).
I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.
Ironically the huge packages will have best security and speed benefits when compiled yourself
I don’t think it’s that clear cut to be honest. More code doesn’t mean the package benefits more from optimizations at all, and even if that were true you might care more about the performance of the kernel or various small libraries that are used by a lot of programs as opposed to how fast some random application that depends on qt-WebKit is:
Never noticed the speed difference besides the insanely long install times. But it was a long time ago I used it, but I did learn a lot.