Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”

  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    2 days ago

    I’m not RanzigFettreduziert, and I don’t know much about PopOS, but…

    • Rolling release is awesome.
    • Amazing documentation.
    • Helpful user base. (The forums are great.)
    • Does pretty much nothing that you don’t specifically tell it to. (Like, very little is installed without your express say-so, for instance.)
    • Customizeable as fuck.
    • Doesn’t making things harder by trying to hide the “hard parts” from you.
    • Doesn’t take days to install Libreoffice like Gentoo.
    • AUR is great for software that isn’t available in the official repos. (Always review the pkgbuild, but practically everything is there.)
    • Very up-to-date (even cutting-edge) on everything.
    • And surprisingly stable given how cutting edge it is. (That said, I’ve never run a keyword-unmasked system.)
    • Definitely will teach you a lot.
    • Very actively developed.

    Downsides:

    • Learning curve. (Definitely not as bad as, say, Gentoo, though.)
    • You’d definitely have to get really comfortable with the command line. (Arguably as much a good thing as it is a downside.)
    • The biggest exception to the “customizeable as fuck” bit is that you’re stuck with SystemD, which is practically a whole OS. (And Artix (Arch but with a choice of init systems) is… kinda janky last I tried it.)
    • Support for non-x86 (like ARM, for instance) is abysmal.

    It’s kindof the second-most hardcore OS out there after Gentoo. (Nobody actually uses LFS as a daily driver, so I’m not counting that for this.) It’s the sort of OS that will teach you a lot and let you get down in the guts. But also avoids a lot of the downsides of Gentoo by remaining a binary OS.

    • metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub
      6·
      2 days ago

      There are a lot of binary packages in Gentoo, for the bigger packages (like LibreOffice), plus you can just use a binary repo if you want. I’ve been on Gentoo a while now, it’s pretty fun and I like all the customization even though I know the relatively minor efficiencies don’t make up for the compile times lol.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 days ago

        Yeah, I know about the binary repositories. I’m running Gentoo as well (on one box with the intention to expand to other machines), but haven’t had occasion to use the official binary repositories yet.

        I imagine I’d probably only ever use them if I wanted to install something temporarily. Install LibreOffice, view a file, uninstall. Just seems weird to have one package compiled with different USE flags than the whole rest of the system.

        And, the compiler optimizations definitely aren’t why I use Gentoo. Probably more than anything, I’m sick of SystemD. And Gentoo feels a whole lot more “under my control” than Arch. (Arch is great for the most part, don’t get me wrong. I just like what Gentoo has to offer.)

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        relatively minor efficiencies don’t make up for the compile times lol.

        It’s sometimes even a regression. For instance, self-compiled pytorch is way slower than the official releases, and Firefox generally is too unless you are extremely careful about it. Stuff like Python doesn’t get a benefit without patches.

        I think the point of Gentoo is supposed to be ‘truly from source’ and utility for embedded stuff, not benchmark performance. Especially since there are distros that offer ‘march’ optimized packages now.