[malwrar]

Gentoo is the best! Once you get the hang of creating a bootable system and feel comfortable painting outside the lines, it feels like Linux from Scratch just without needing to manually build everything. I automated building system images with just podman (to build the rootfs) and qemu (test boot & write the rootfs, foreign arch emulation) and basically just build new system images once a week w/ CI for all my hardware + rsync to update. Probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever built, at this point I’m effectively building my own Linux distro from source and it’s all defined in Containerfiles! I have such affection for the Gentoo team for enabling this project, shocking to discover how little they operate on I’m definitely setting up a recurring donation.

[arendtio]

I think it is a great learning opportunity, but after using Gentoo for a decade or so, I prefer Arch these days. So if you want to learn more about Linux and its ecosystems, go for it, do it for a few months or years.

That said, I haven't tried Gentoo with binaries from official repositories yet. Maybe that makes it less time-consuming to keep your system up to date.

[blaerk]

Been happily and very successfully using the official binpkgs, it works really well, sometimes there's a slight delay for the binary versions of the source packages to appear in the repositories, but that's about it. I guess it's kind of running Arch, but with portage <3! And the occasional compilation because your use flags didn't really match the binaries

[raphinou]

Did you document this somewhere? I'm interested to know more

[malwrar]

Nah, first time I’ve mentioned it anywhere. Happy to answer questions, if there’s interest maybe this could be my reason for a first blog post.

[samuelbrian]

Not what was mentioned by parent but I've been working on an embedded Linux build system that uses rootfs from container images: https://makrocosm.github.io/makrocosm/

The example project uses Alpine base container images, but I'm using a Debian base container for something else I'm working on.

[jayofdoom]

Honestly this is just sorta a Tuesday for an advanced Gentoo user? There are lots of ways to do this documented on the Gentoo wiki. Ask in IRC or on the Forum if you can't find it. "Catalyst" is the method used by the internal build systems to produce images, for instance https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Catalyst.

[pepoluan]

Gentoo is LFS but with the interdependence between packages mapped out for you (all hail the USE flags!) Or, alternatively, Arch with even more customization knobs to twiddle.

I have had Gentoo in at least one nearby system (physical and/or VM) since about 15 years ago. It's always a blast interacting with it.

[pjmlp]

After driving Gentoo for a while back in 2004, I decided I don't really want to wait compiling for everything.

[techcode]

For those that don't want to wait compiling for everything - https://www.calculate-linux.org/

It's still 100% pure Gentoo (and actually these days even vanilla Gentoo itself offers precompiled binaries) so you still can compile things in rare cases that binary isn't already compiled with use/config that you want.

[malwrar]

That’s mostly why I build system images in CI; my slowest builds (qemu user mode emulation of aarch64 for e.g. raspberry pi boards) can take multiple days so I just declared myself a 1 week window between updates and then just pull in the changes via rsync. I even boot the images with qemu as part of the testing cycle. At some point I might try building and hosting prebuilt bins like gentoo does now, I don’t use those though because I explicitly want to build everything from source.