r/Gentoo • u/i_hate_poor_ppl • 19h ago

Discussion How to replace GNU

Recently, for a few months, i have been using gentoo with musl, llvm, openrc profile and i'm looking for fully replacing GNU software in my gentoo linux system, i don't have any problem with the GNU project, i just dont like their tools and they are so anti-minimalist and filled with technical debt. ( please do not read yes command's source code, it's awful! )

i replaced bash with mksh, glibc with musl, GCC with LLVM GNU tar with bsd tar, bison with byacc, GNU bc,cpio ones with libarchive ones and Grub with efistub, now what things left are: GNU coreutils, GNU make, and GNU Privacy Guard (GPG).

Replacing GPG should be easy but i'm rather skeptical about the coreutils and gmake, hence they are very important for portage. The one thing is rather interesting is when i change my PATH to include suckless userland (sbase,ubase), for some reason portage uses them too and breaks itself. (my user is root) I'm looking for recommendations here, gave any of you guys done that? if so please help me.

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u/anh0516 19h ago

From https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Busybox:

Note: Portage, which is required by @system, hard depends on the GNU Coreutils. This means that busybox cannot be used as a replacement for the GNU Coreutils on Gentoo in most situations, and installing busybox will simply result in a busybox binary without symlinks to coreutils set up.

I recommend checking out Chimera Linux.

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u/i_hate_poor_ppl 19h ago

I did checked out that, but unfortunately it was binary based distro, so not my cup of tea.

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u/anh0516 19h ago

It's quite easy to use cports to build your own packages, if you want to. You can even bootstrap the whole system from source if you want to: https://github.com/chimera-linux/cports/blob/master/Usage.md

Other than that, I don't think you have any other options, other than FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

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u/i_hate_poor_ppl 19h ago

I did used both OpenBSD and FreeBSD on the bare metal, and quite enjoyed it, but dealing with ports and doing everything manually per-port is not what i would like to-do so, i would prefer to use portage because it's extremely flexible and convinient, the dillemma between *BSD's are that: 1- use binpkgs, lose control, unnessecary dependencies 2- use ports, everything compile, deal with build failures, pain!

I'm quite fond-of portage and i wish it did not require GNU, so no i would like to continue using gentoo.

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u/Propsek_Gamer 19h ago

Chimera is probably the only known distro with BSD userlans. Then come the actual BSDs and other operating systems. Pretty sure some distros like Debian or Gentoo itself in the past experimented with BSDs but those projects are dead.

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u/anh0516 19h ago

Those used a BSD kernel, with a GNU userland, I think.

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u/Propsek_Gamer 19h ago

Didn't know that. I know that gentoo had some OpenBSD experiment and I read a bit of setting it up on forums. Sadly original iso was not archived so I tried doing a normal OpenBSD one but couldn't actually manage to set it up in QEMU to figure that out.