1y ago

It took a lot of work, but I've created the definitive Linux distro flowchart

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Install Gentoo
- the ultimate beginner's distro, it's a great start before moving on to something complicated like mint
- Oddly, Gentoo was where I started out when I got serious about using Linux. That was when I was in my 20’s and I wanted to get every last bit of performance out of my computer. Also, breaking stuff was fun and gave me a chance to figure new stuff out.
  Now I just want stuff to work and be relatively up to date. So I use Debian testing.
  
  I've found a good compromise between the two. I've disabled most of the desktop profile USE flags and I compile everything with -Ofast and LTO
  Portage errors are uncommon, and build failures are easily fixed by disabling compilation flags from package.env. Build failures get less and less common as package.env grows (it's currently at about 20 lines)
  As for the kernel, I just started with a distribution kernel, disabled all modules and only enabled the ones that I need (this can automatically be done with make localmodconfig). These modules are built-in (so lsmod usually returns nothing)
  I chose systemd because of the huge increase in boot speed
  
  Compiling everything with LTO landed me in a situation where a bunch of packages fail to build because apparently having some LTO'd static libraries can cause issues.
  I'm now going to start investigating where exactly the issue is. Trouble is, the package that was giving me errors, depended on a whole lot of static libraries, soooooo.... Good luck to me.
  Being an ultra-madlad, I used to also -ffast-math everything that didn't fail, but because I didn't know about package.env yet, I found it easier to just keep it off rather than turning it off and on again every time I needed to emerge something that failed because of it.
  
  apparently having some LTO’d static libraries can cause issues
  Yeah, I think I've had that problem once or twice. I think I found the culprits by disabling all build flags for libraries that seemed related, rebuilding them, running emerge @preserved-rebuild and then repeating the process to narrow it down
  dmesg and PFL help with diagnosing crashes due to libraries, but I don't think that would help here
  If it helps, here's my package.env:
  bash
  
  # Build failures app-emulation/wine-vanilla noflto O3 sys-apps/groff O3 dev-lang/rust noflto dev-lang/python O3 sys-auth/polkit O3 sys-libs/libomp noflto sys-libs/compiler-rt noflto net-libs/nodejs O3 dev-lang/duktape O3 x11-drivers/xf86-video-intel noflto # Runtime failures gnome-extra/cjs noflto O3 sys-devel/llvm noflto
- What a madlad

109 comments