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Will Gentoo give me a better understanding of Linux than Arch? Or should I do a LFS install on an old laptop? My goal is to understand Linux better but LFS seems overkill.(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

Probably, especially if you encounter problems. Install from stage 3, configure your kernel manually, setup a basic X11 setup (xinit, simple WM) and you'll be fine. After that, a decade of tweaking (which implies a deep knownledge of sh/bash and possibly a little C) and fixing soykaf that breaks should get you up to speed.

>>74688 Definitely, just from trying a bit of the install I've learnt a lot I never learnt with arch

>>74688 The big takeaways I got from LFS was I used make and gcc a lot. I used it so much I actually just wrapped all the make and gcc commands into a shell script and let it run on its own. It took a while. I didn't really learn very much and it was kind of a massive waste of time imo.

I don't get why people want to install this or that distro to "learn" Linux. All you have to do is do some research and use more of the tools at your disposal. How would installing Gentoo, or even Arch, help you understand Linux? Actually, take a step back, and ask yourself what exactly do you want to understand. Stop with this distrohopping mentality. The stuff you learn by installing Arch or Gentoo is so niche that you're not gonna be using that knowledge much outside of installing Arch or Gentoo. >inb4 you can learn how to configure grub/systemd-boot, partition a disk, change timezones, customize boot scripts... You can already do all of that in literally every distro. And don't get me started on LFS. IMO that's either for kernel hackers or aspiring (hardcore) distro maintainers. If you wanna do that as a fun project/hobby, fine, but don't lie to yourself saying that you need to install it (or Arch or Gentoo) to "learn" Linux, whatever that means. What do you even wanna learn?

>>74706 it's a hobby, laianon

>>74706 A lot of people do not know, what exactly they want and need to learn. And tossing yourself into a situation there you would probably have to solve problems is a valid way to learn. Yeah, Gentoo and LFS are pretty much buzz words for many, but that's not that bad. And I do not agree on "The stuff you learn by installing Arch or Gentoo is so niche". That's only true if you copy/paste commands from manual to terminal. F.e. gentoo gives you a lot of inside into how software is packaged and compiled. And most of that is not gentoo specific.

>>74688 Ive been warned for not "Elaborating on the your opinion". The sentence "Will this give me a better understanding". Conflating a question with an opinion is just amazing.

>>74725 It's the default copypasta for warning a thread opening of the same value (That is to say, a thread opening with "What you think of [x]" and not saying their piece of mind. Why do you think gentoo will give you a better understanding? What is LFS? etc etc...) . This question should have been posted in the QnA thread, but I think this is a good question for its own thread, anyway. Anyway. Gentoo will give you a more grounded idea of what is going on in the background when Arch or any other distro is installing itself on your machine. Making you go thru the process of the install manually step by step. I think it's worth trying it out if you want to peek behind the curtains and see how the Lego blocks are attached together.

i used arch for about a decade for my main pc then switched to gentoo about a month ago. gentoo will give you easier opportunities to learn, particularly if you go a bit off the rails with it. for instance, i replaced the default init system (openrc) with s6. this taught me a ton about how the userspace init process works, since i had to write the init scripts to do stuff like mount the dev and tmp directories, set up system users, handle logging, etc. you of course can do this with any linux distro, but gentoo makes it more approachable. if i were doing this with fedora id essentially be maintaining a soft fork. with gentoo there's a lot more available for customization before you get to that territory.

>>74688 Both Gentoo and Arch are fine (for regular daily use and for learning). But full LFS will teach you more. But note that LFS is *not* suitable as daily driver. It takes too much effort for 1 person to maintain all packages yourself.

>>74708 Ok. >>74716 >gentoo gives you a lot of inside into how software is packaged and compiled The way software is packaged in Gentoo is not the same way they are packaged in other distros, and you can learn how they are packaged in other distros by just researching, and learning how to maintain packages yourself. Some distros do make that process easier, but not specific to Arch or Gentoo. >And most of that is not gentoo specific. That's why I said you don't need Gentoo to learn it. In a way, every linux distro is the same: You can learn how to use make, gcc, clang, meson, git, etc, by just compiling software yourself; You can learn grub, dmesg, dd, fdisk, ip/ifconfig, and other sysadmin tools by simply using them when you need them. And this applies to literally everything in Linux. Gentoo is, beyond a source-based distro, a Linux distro.

LFS definetly is the way to go

Why not GFS (Gentoo From Scratch)? The best of both worlds...

>>74706 As someone with a deeper understanding than me, what suggestions would you have for someone with a poor understanding of Linux or just computers in general, to further there knowledge about the former?

>>74743 >As someone with a deeper understanding than me I never said that. I'm just a lainon. >what suggestions would you have etc etc I'm asking this again: What do you want to learn? I guess my biggest advice is to be practical about it; if you have a problem that you want to solve, do your research and solve it. There's no one-size-fits-all answer for that, because everyone has different goals. >poor understanding of Linux What do you mean by that? Poor understand of the Linux kernel? Userspace? coreutils? Shell scripting? Ricing? Package management? System administration? >or just computers in general I guess just... use your computer more, and be interested in learning about it. Sounds vague, because it is. Learning and growing is not as straightforward as you might think, and there's no course for "learning about computers", because "learning about computers" depends a lot about your own goals and aspirations.

>>74688 I have never used Gentoo, but most of my Linux-specific knowledge comes from doing fairly esoteric stuff, e.g.: - for a while I used transmission-daemon inside a network namespace which could only send and receive data through an OpenVPN interface. - I've made some toy programs that don't use any library at all and instead use syscalls directly. Especially useful for throwing something together quickly in assembly. - using certain Linux features directly, like namespaces instead of relying on Docker. Or creating a FUSE driver. If you want to dig deep into Linux internals then OSDev might be interesting. You'll have to dive into Linux source code often to help create and debug drivers, as it might be the only reference for some hardware.

>>74740 Ain't that just a regular Gentoo Install?

>>74732 I agree with your post. In my opinion it is probably a better way to learn. But the idea I was trying to state is that Gentoo and some other distributions are good for learning because they ask you questions. I have several friends using Linux Mint and knowing nothing about Linux, because it's that easy. Installing and maintaining Gentoo pretty much forces you to learn. Yes, you definitely don't need Gentoo to understand Linux. But some people need that push and restriction for better results. P.S. Also after reading you post I thought that Slackware is probably a better example.

I am planning to switch to Gentoo soon and I am particularly interested in portage and all the configurations linked to useflags. It appears to be a somewhat decent system for patching packages in a consistent manner while providing local optimizations. That being said, I am not convinced using gentoo would improve my understanding of gnu/linux. Rather, solutions like Linux From Scratch seem to be much more appropriate for such objectives as it forces you to understand each component of you system individually. Gentoo does not really force you to understand the underlying of your system, it just happens that the level of customization it offers with portage is sufficient to make your own personal distribution with it. In that sense, it can help improving understanding of linux.

>>74744 The fact I have repeatedly said "I want a better understanding" should tell you I dont know the specific thing I want to learn because I dont even know what the specifics are. I want a deeper understanding of how Linux works. Before I started using Linux I only knew how to turn a computer on and open a browser. Installing Arch then taught me about partitions and package dependency etc. I learn better by doing rather than reading. I'm not looking for a new daily driver distribution. I just want to learn and I do so by doing.

*Absolute waste of time.* Gentoo's philosophy states that good software must not put itself in the user's way, which some libraries you will have to compile weekly really don't agree with. The only takeaway I get from 1 year of using Gentoo as a daily driver is that I won't write cumbersome software that needs a dedicated team on each Linux distro just to ***make it compile***. To prevent you from wasting time, I recommend you just pick a feasible tech project. If your idea isn't to create a new Linux distribution, learning the obscure parts of such a system is going to be of very niche orientation. You'll come across 90% of this information anyway if you're using your computer for anything besides reading mail and posting on lainchan dot org.

>download or buy a linux book >install a random distro thats it. i am sure you will learn more than any gentoo user/arch user out there.

if you want to learn linux, do sysadmin soykaf i've install funtoo before and it doesn't teach much linux soykaf, if you want a deeper understanding of linux do sysadmin or make your own kernel

>>76078 >reading books teaches you soykaf IDK fam I think you should encounter the problem and then fix it. LFS puts problems in front of you, but quickly I think it becomes rote and its coverage isnt complete. Gentoo is fine but its also a niche. I think the best solution is to impose bizzare aribtary requirements and then break yoursystem to the point where you have to think hard and read a lot to get it working again. can be done on any distro, but I assume a simpler one is easier. arch might even be better than gentoo, and you can build all you need on either of them.

Who the fuarrrk keeps necrobumping ancient threads

>>76081 you beyach what a coincidence I just installed gentoo -- i'm like a week into it, It will teach you a bit, but mostly it fuarrrking is like kicking dead whales down the beach, it's just not feasible to install everything you're gonna use, apparrently just last year portage allows the installation of precompiled binaries of *certain* programs, that saves some time , but overall you're going to have to plan out what you want and only install the soykaf you know that you want. Arch/Artix is probably a lot faster when it comes to installing software so if you're going for education do that The perks of gentoo is when it gets working it works well, and you are *necessarily* going to have a minimal, and have some awareness of everything installed, I'm going to stick with it, but really, especially if you're new just stick to debian.

I don't think there's much need to go and do a full LFS. LFS will have you build a toolchain, then build it again. Just set up a boot partition, compile a kernel and put it in there with a bootloader, and separate a root partition, with an init script of your own, and then start adding software as you need it, start with a working tooolchain, busybox and a shell.

TL;DR Dive deeper into Arch, help maintain stuff, go find bugs reported by other people and hunt them down and help fix them, or if you have some project ideas, then work on that. Jumping distros won't teach you anywhere near actually doing realistic every-day maintainer or developer stuff, and free software provides just the right environment to do that. --- Anyway, Slackware seconded. But it all depends on what you mean by learning Linux. If your goal is to become a corporate sysadmin doing Docker and Kubernetes, then your point of focus would be different than if you wanted to become a distro maintainer or free software hacker, or to work on your own minimalist SoC home-lab empire. It is also true that most things diffuse into each other, everything is fuzzy, there are no clean-cut lines. Total immersion is what you need. All advanced Linux distros will force you to learn stuff to use them, which is good. You will probably gain more /general/ knowledge by /diving/ deeper into Arch, than by using Gentoo. Maintain a few PKGBUILDs, patch some stuff, rebuild stuff, create a few servers and write service files, etc. Gentoo will teach you a lot too, but a lot of it is only applicable to Gentoo. They are building their own spaceship there, with all the homegrown APIs and standards. A GLEP (Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposals) to deprecate another GLEP, and the 8th EAPI packaging API version to superseded the previous EAPI, USE flags hiding the nuance of actual package build options, etc. I admire the effort, and what they built is beautiful in many ways, and even elegant sometimes, but you have to realize that what you are doing when using Gentoo is participating in a niche computing culture with their own niche customs and tribal knowledge. Arch is a lot more KISS in that way (although less so as time progresses, sadly). They are less opinionated, their build systems are mostly simpler (but more adhoc), etc. You are closer to upstream with Arch, and you are not isolated by many layers of abstraction as Gentoo or Debian or NixOS, for example, do. Slackware goes further; less abstract, less opinionated, simple, minimalist. Slackware is so unopinionated it feels very close to a blank canvas. It is probably the closest major distro to a pre-made LFS with the bare minimum. Basically its developers' thesis is: they maintain very few packages to cover as much as they reasonably can, with one or two maintainers only, and as a beginner you just install them all, and from there you're on your own (you will remove packages, or install fewer ones, once you have a better idea about the relation between packages, and especially dynamic linking stuff). If Gentoo is a niche community culture, then Slackware is a culture of mostly isolated individuals, a culture of you. No build systems, no magical installers, no dependency management, no 10 repositories with different versions, nothing. The whole thing is like a UNIX of the olden days. No bloat, only you, and the [near] empty canvas. This is a scary feeling, and the lack of structure scares most people away, "this is not supported, and that is not maintained" they say, but in reality Slackware is saying /you/ go do that, there's nothing preventing you from doing that. You just write a script that compiles and throws things into a tar file, and barely anything else. Installed files are logged into a list text file in /var/log/packages/, go do stuff. Upstream software mostly unpatched, go play with it. Forget the distro, its just a bunch of folders with stuff in it, you do what you want. Building your own automations leads you to actually face fundamental problems, and studying the solutions of others, including from other distros, is a very good learning experience. If you want to go further down the abstraction stack, then LFS is where you end up. If Slackware is just a few pieces of software unzipped in a bunch of folders, then LFS is an empty folder. You start by building the most basic tools. A lot of learning perhaps, but also a lot of tedious repetitive work. Once you start automating the tedious repetitive bits, you find that you're just building another distro. --- Random rambling side notes: Between LFS and Slackware in abstraction there's CRUX, but I like man pages and non-English languages so no thanks. Also, making your own initrd file-systems, on any disto, is /technically/ making a whole Linux distro. Compile a few Kernels, configuring them from scratch, you can do that on any distro too, but Gentoo wiki is very helpful for all the build options. Building little distros for embedded applications in constrained environments is very nice for learning. If people talk a lot about containers then remember they are fundamentally just kernel namespaces and cgroups, but people don't care, what they actually want is just to run away from having to worry about OSes and dependencies, so they just ship a whole OS with the app, and outsource responsibility "it's not my fault! they broke it!".

One of the better parts about gentoo is how low effort it is to apply patches Anyway distro doesn't matter, just use what you like and learn the ins and outs while you're at it.

People get way too caught up in picking a distro. It doesn't matter. If its Unix-like and well made its good enough to learn with. What you learn and how well you do it depends on your own initiative and how you choose to make use of the software in front of you. Mint, Debian, FreeBSD, Arch etc. all are good enough and spending too much time picking between them will get you bogged down in OS specific problems or weird religious debates over pointless things like licenses. Pick one distro or OS and stick with it. A distro or OS can't teach you anything. Its up to you to learn and explore the system. That's the most important thing.

>>74688 Arch, then gentoo, then lfs. Arch - Basic system assembly Gentoo - A look into ways of the programs(optimisation levels, use flags) as well as making a kernel LFS - idk never tried it, most likely the above two but on steroids

>>76523 Over half of LFS is bootstrapping utilities. Not worth it given that the system you end up with won't even have a fully configured package manager.

>>76536 if you want a fully configured package manager on LFS, then why not set one up. There's no special magic to it. Maybe that will make it less LFS-y but I dont think thats a problem.

>>76538 because gentoo exists which has package manager that supports building from source, pulling in prebuilt packages from anywhere and building packages on a server farm on demand, there's 0 point in making your own. Everything on gentoo is configurable, including profiles that control what constitutes a "base" package. Gentoo is LFS without a waste of time. You get a full distro made up entirely of binary packages and can work down to the bottom to configure whatever you want, starting from compiling basic packages yourself down to removing useless drivers from kernel. The opposite is spending 2 weeks figuring out why your kernel won't boot on your hardware, because configuring Linux actually requires understanding about a lot of things, all of which is done for you with prebuilt gentoo kernels, you emerge it and your system works, configuration is optional, but not made impossibly prohibitive unlike on every other distro.

The point of LFS is both learning how GNU/Linux ecosystem works and functions among all the diverse protocols, APIs, tools, daemons... Basically all his guts. But anyway, if you want to learn a lot also (but less than LFS) Gentoo is the perfect option for that purpose and daily use. The other point is that you need a package manager and community behind if you want to use it without overcomplexity. LFS suits either the aim of teaching in the most complete manner as well as preparing you if you want to built a new project distro (obviously isn't possible in a short-term, but always is interesting to try it).

>>76608 LFS doesn't teach anything useful, it's like learning how a car works when all you have is car parts and no manual for assembly. It's both faster and more useful to learn from an existing (good) distro.

>>76594 >because gent0o exists which has package manager that supports bvilding from source, pu||ing in prebuilt packages from anywhere and building packages on a s3rv3r farm on d3mand, there's [ZERO] point in making your own yeah 0k so put p0rtage on ur el FS. el FS isnt about writing your own k3rnel from scratch bvddy o its about putting together a system out of pr3uuritten comp0nents. A package manager is such a compon3nt.

>>76612 I have better things to do than larp making gentoo from scratch, if I want to learn how cars are manufactured I will go to an existing factory, not try to build a factory building of my own without knowing anything, so why would learning about a working system be any different? LFStards only know how to parrot things since that's all the soykafty LFS book teaches - how to copy commands and wait 50 hours until process is complete.

>>76612 Are you writing like ten because of loonchan's retarded measures?

>>76619 ya ya ya iz maybe si//y bud methinks u get sumting frum de rote copy uv commands & soykafe. I not big LFS nigger but I learn a lot frum such copying cummandliners wen I linux noob, ventua//y thing start make sense; u hab 2 start frum sum were uv litt/e nowledge. Would only rekkumend to n00bs who wud like 2 no moar & hab time / spare machine to set aside 4 it, but iz gud 4 dat in me 'umble oponion fact0ry big, sh0w u c0mplicated cystem, full of distracshun n sh33t, needless bits. u make car urself in ur garage u must learn w0t is E55ENTIAL 'n pro//y do nawt mush more den dat 2 start wit at leest. same wit leenux'n'ganooo, ubingobongo werks but u cum at frum diffrent direkshun, maybe bof ways u leern same soykafe 1 day. >>76631 daz write but iz a/s0 a wittle fun. sumetimes i get flagged for da spamnsheet idk y

>>74688 hello, can't sleep so decided to install gentoo on my lenovo idapad S210 touch (old laptop i don't use anymore) Should i go with GUI installation or minimal? Prior to this i have only installed gentoo once on my pc which took 2-3 days If you can provide help it would be appreciated. (i go by arv on libera)

>>78264 > ...decided to install gentoo on my lenovo idapad S210 touch (old laptop i don't use anymore) If you're looking to build your own kernel, it can be helpful to make a hardware probe of your system. This can help with modules and firmware and the like. See here: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=howto > Should i go with GUI installation or minimal? You don't actually need a Gentoo ISO to install Gentoo on a machine. You can do it from a live USB and copy-paste the commands straight from the Gentoo wiki. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7W9MItUSGw It's your prerogative if you'd like to go with a GUI or minimal installation. I'd recommend you use a Linux live USB with a GUI and web browser (the video linked above uses Linux Mint but you could use just about any system with a live option).

>>78283 Alright, I'll follow this video, idr which video i watched last time when I installed gentoo but it took days on my PC, maybe because of low processing power. But the comments on this one seem very positive.