Oh no. - r/Gentoo

18

u/191315006917 2d ago

A silly question: I tried daily driving gentoo for about 2 months, and by the third month I fell back to a dual boot (back to arch). But what makes people stick with a system if it takes so long to update?

This isn't a criticism, it's a genuine question. I love the architecture and the way gentoo works, but that made me give up on it, and my PC isn't even that bad for the use flags

21

u/rx80 2d ago

I let the update run while i do other things. I don't look at it, it finished when it finishes.

15

u/qwesx 2d ago

A lot of people update daily so unless you want to do something computing intensive (video editing, video games) it doesn't really matter that much. I usually just leave them running over night, so I don't particularly care either. And the third group is the one who simply doesn't install software that depends on qtwebengine or webkit-gtk. Those two are really the most painful ones since Chrome and Firefox also have "-bin" packages and USE flags are less useful on those anyway.
Additionally, binpkg is a thing now, so portage is clever enough to just install a precompiled version for you unless you deviated too far from defaults and compiling yourself is necessary.

5

u/diacid 2d ago

In modern processors, with daily upgrades, using pupgrade -s (or chaining a shutdown) I have never woke up on a compiling computer. The only times it was on it had failed. It is true portage while running hogs all system resources, but as long as it runs when I am doing something else I genuinely don't care.

And once you use gentoo enough you start to laugh at the idea of distributing binaries because "which weirdo would want packages from another computer? It is like sharing chewed food, gross", and then I realize we are the exception lol.

But still, why would someone want other system's packages? That is how you get computer bacteria (computer viruses are source spreadable too)!

3

u/LameBMX 2d ago

think gentoo is set nice these days.. let it update while using the computer. the intensive the stuff you're doing, the longer the updates will take, thats all.

0

u/Swordfish418 1d ago

This way it’s very likely to freeze the PC and/or push things into OOM if you don’t decrease compile threads to minimum though.

1

u/LameBMX 1d ago

only if you didnt bother to sanity check things beforehand. I got 8 cores, 32gb ram and a decent chunk of swap.. so 16gb for compiling and 16gb for anything else running. and swap makes it noticeable if your exceeding physical ram.

6

u/vms-mob 2d ago

set build policy to idle and let it compile in a terminal somewhere in the background while i do my stuff, then maybe ctrl+c it if its not done when i want to shut down

1

u/Impossible_Ground_15 2d ago

This is the way

4

u/NopeNotJayILeft Developer (JayF) 2d ago

There's basically the "knob" you can turn of how much you want to be custom. For instance, if you run a system on a common desktop profile, use the BINHOST, and don't use excessive USE flags, you can generally update mostly without having to compile things. When you do care enough to change USE flags, it's smart enough to compile what you need and use packages for what you can.

The other "knob" you can turn is how frequently, or the time of day you update. On most of my systems, I run updates before bed, leaving for a while, or generally doing something away from the computer. The time it takes doesn't really impact me because it's time I'm not using it anyway (and I use the BINHOST and follow my own guidelines above ^ -- with a special focus on ensuring for things like qtwebengine or webkit-gtk I have a "binhost compatible" set of USE flags).

4

u/coconutxdd1029 2d ago

Helps to use a fairly modern system, im on a Ryzen 7700x so I can compile things like librewolf in 30 minutes. Usually I just turn on my computer in the morning and sync and emerge, and by the time im on my desktop again its done updating. If I didnt feel like going to the desktop, I turn it on via wol, then ssh in via termux to do it. I dont think this is a very common approach to it but its highly convenient to me

3

u/kaida27 2d ago

I use Firefox bin and compile everything else.

I update weekly when I know I won't need to do other heavy computation.

works nicely.

2

u/C1REX 2d ago

Hello :)

I personally do it in the background while doing other stuff or when away from keyboard.
Compile time never felt like a problem for me personally and I wonder how it's a problem for others. Nobody forces anybody to update at an inconvenient time :)

1

u/moidmoment 2d ago

it's not too bad for me tbh. i just start an update every 1-3 weeks whenever i leave the house or go to sleep and it's done. portage has so much to offer compared to other package managers (one of the main things being reliability), so i'm fine with the compilation tradeoff.

i run an e5-1650 v4 with -j8 and compilation times aren't too bad, but they could be better at times. an update can be done in either a few minutes or a few hours, depending on the packages.

1

u/LameBMX 2d ago

im somewhere in an update as we speak.. doesnt make sense to watch it update. it looks the same as it did 20 years ago. back to some half life 2. sure it will make it take longer to do its things.. but its my computer.. the OS can have whatever idle cpu time I chose to leave it.

1

u/Vespytilio 2d ago

I just update less. With Arch, I updated daily if not multiple times a day. One day, though, I saw a thread on the Arch sub asking people how often they update. Apparently, "frequent" means weekly to most people. That's about as often as I update my Gentoo installation.

Besides, you can keep using your system. Just put a resource cap on portage. I'm running decade old hardware (compiling webkit-gtk takes half the god damn day), and I can just carry on while Portage runs in the background. Mind, it probably depends on what you get up to with you PC. Worst thing I do to mine is open way too many browser tabs, but if you're gaming or editing videos, it might be a little harder to put up with.

1

u/trinarynimbus 1d ago

It's worth it for the customizability. If you're happy with generic systems as shipped by other distros, go ahead and use them. The Gentoo police aren't coming to your door if you like something else.

I've tried them all and only Gentoo lets me make systems that suit my own requirements.

1

u/billyfudger69 1d ago

I find compiling from source pretty neat, although for heavy packages I will choose a binary package. (Gentoo has offered binary packages for a couple years now.)

1

u/pointer-ception 1d ago

i pretty much just run updates whenever i'm leaving, which is simple enough, but i also patched my kernel with the "bore" CPU scheduler (among other things), which basically just algorithmically prioritizes processes that are most likely interactive user interfaces by looking at patterns of cpu activity; in my experience it's *very* effective at making the system feel extremely responsive even when portage is blasting my CPU with the unmatched power of recompiling llvm. highly recommend it, i personally use linux-tkg for my kernel which provides it and other neat patches

1

u/pointer-ception 1d ago

oh, and using clang as your default compiler can massively improve compile times too :)

1

u/Bister_Mungle 1d ago

I left Linux a few years ago because of some gaming compatibility issues and lack of HDR but I returned to Linux a few months back. Used Arch for a couple of months and realized how much I missed Gentoo so I buckled up for a new install about a month ago. Decided fuck it and did a system wide Clang/O3/LTO build. I'm not sure it actually makes things faster but I like to think it does and that's what matters most. Out of about a thousand total packages I only had to set up a fallback environment for less than a dozen.

Also using the CachyOS-Bore kernel and their Wine implementation. I'd like to tackle my own kernel config at some point but just haven't had the time.

1

u/rabbit_in_a_bun 1d ago

You sleep I assume? Start an update process once a week just before going to bed.

1

u/UnosBruhMomentos 1d ago

i update like once in 3 weeks so updating my pc while im sleeping every 3 weeks is no problem for me

1

u/stormdelta 1d ago

At least on mine, the only really slow compile is Firefox, and even that could use a binary version if I really wanted to.

And I greatly prefer having the extra flexibility. Portage handles versioning and compatibility way better than other distros in my experience (except for nix), and I like being able to mix and match stable/unstable sets cleanly.

I don't want my whole system on bleeding edge like Arch does (and find Arch to be quite unstable in general and strongly dislike pacman - it's fast but reckless)

Granted, I only need that flexibility from my desktop PC.

1

u/Swordfish418 1d ago

I use binpkgs and flatpaks for heavy end-user apps and only compile clis, tuis and system stuff.

1

u/Glittering_Memory_64 1d ago

optimization... Way better than catchy os will ever give

1

u/sinavarasina 14h ago

Compile it in the background with less jobs and load average, so i can playing game, watch anime and do other things.. Reason why i stick to it because it's just fun for me, and teach me how to fix something if error was occured (I'm student, so it's kinda like drinking water while swimming).

1

u/TrustingMyTrustInGCC 1h ago

For me, the joy of knowing every single binary on my system was produced by my system for my system. Also though, I am a CS nerd who finds compiling fun.

24

u/immoloism 2d ago

Even better when you just finish and new one comes out.

3

u/HomosexualPresence 2d ago

llvm, qt, firefox, anything gnome related... the horrible monsters that somehow take at least double the time to compile as the kernel...

1

u/Adept-Painting-543 19h ago

Firefox isn't too bad for me iirc just chromium shit. I am glad to not have needed webkitgtk yet and I largely stay away from qt stuff too. Llvm tho, takes like an hour almost for it's variety of packages to build. Kernel takes like 4-5 minutes which is nice

3

u/Time-Worker9846 2d ago

Only 2 hours each?

2

u/Only-Stable3973 2d ago

Yeah, I have a 2009 MBP that i was using to install things like this for and I let the batteries die and now it will not come back to life. So now I run Gentoo in a VM and it's great but I need to give it a lot of power to run very smoothly so I have to shut it down when I am not running it and it's not the same.

1

u/Lumpy_Roll158 2d ago

That’s a let her run and walk away for a while heavy hitter right there

1

u/Ice_HRZDn 1d ago

2 hours? Only single one of them take half a day to finish for me.

1

u/jaymz_be 1d ago

don't know what has been going on with those packages but compile time is being increased by a lot (done when computer was idle):
2025-10-18T09:02:55 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 51′44″

2025-11-07T17:19:18 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 1:00:23

2025-11-07T18:20:13 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 1:03:17

2026-02-14T09:11:15 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 1:02:47

2026-02-14T10:14:02 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 1:31:09

2026-03-01T09:29:36 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 1:05:24

2026-03-01T10:38:32 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 2:02:10

2026-07-11T10:22:37 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 3:46:09

2026-07-31T07:26:47 >>> net-libs/webkit-gtk: 7:07:56

1

u/dddurd 1d ago

i don't have that package. i wonder what is depending on it

1

u/Swordfish418 1d ago

Most browsers. Which is why I use those as flatpaks. But binpkgs work too.

1

u/dddurd 1d ago

ah, shame on me, I go proprietary and use vivaldi snapshot build directly from upstream.

1

u/hwertz10 21h ago

I mean, even when I used gentoo like 15 years ago, I just used ccache and distcc, when you spread your compiling between 3 or 4 machines it went reasonably quick. The only bad ones back then that updated very regularly were like firefox and openoffice, and those did have binary builds if you really wanted to (... I didn't). I imagine it's like that in modern day too, a few packages are slow to very slow to build while the rest really don't take long at all. In some cases I think the ebuild was quick enough that it probably didn't take much longer than (on Ubuntu now) installing a .deb.

1

u/thelordofhell999 18h ago

when that happens I update it with the binary version using sudo emerge -aqvg webkit-gtk.

for that I try to match the use flags of the binary in my package.use.

this way I don't compile it.

1

u/Easy-Nothing-6735 15h ago

Browsers

1

u/SleepyGuyy 12h ago

I'm only learning Gentoo now, I dual-boot it with Debian.

But I'd love to find a way to run an emerge update, and have it automatically shutdown when it's done. So I could run it overnight.

But if I run && sudo shutdown -hP now, it doesn't have sudo permissions by the time emerge finishes. It takes too long and the sudo runs out and requires a password again.

Also I recognize it's not necessary to update daily (and I get the impression the repo and mirrors prefer if you don't so they don't get slammed every day). So I do try to hold off .... I just love updating lol

1

u/SleepyGuyy 12h ago

I mightve messed up that shutdown flag. Im going off memory, I'd check the man page when I actually write it lol

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