In practice, many people don't understand that Gentoo is a meta-distribution and try to run it like a simple distribution, leading to arbitrary ABI breakage and chaos.
If you want to run Gentoo on servers, you need to test all upgrades on build machines before rolling them out. You need to publish your own binary packages. You need to do a lot of the testing that Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. I have some friends who set up their own hosting business based on Gentoo and they seem to be doing it right. Their servers are very stable. Testing updates is an ongoing expense, but I think it has worked out well for them. I do not want that on my production server.
I want a hyper stable base that is tested by the masses and when possible has some big org behind it who's supporting it and thus very conservative when changing stuff. On top of that base I might roll my own packages or include a fringy package repository. Never I want the base to be different for everyone. This is not too hard for any distro I've used. So may we conclude, as GP said, that running Gentoo on production servers is just not a good idea?
This is a little too anecdotal for me : I've done my share of Gentoo, and this system in intriguing. But when I need stability, as I need for backend services, then it will not even be on the long list.
I found some similar-level intriguing features in NixOS. I'd probably still not run it for backend services, but I might be compelled to run it on the application layer in some cases.
You've correctly understood the nontrivial costs involved in trying to use Gentoo on production servers, and correctly understood that the benefits aren't relevant to your personal use-cases, or the most-common use-cases for production distributions in most industries. I don't at all read your parent as asserting that all production deployments should make use of a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but instead describing the specialized features that are useful for some specific niches. If you have some business reason to want to run arbitrary combinations of different versions of different software together, or to more-easily manage distributing software to your platform with many different features that you sometimes want compiled out, or otherwise if a slow stable extremely-reliable distribution isn't handling your needs, you might want to consider using Gentoo instead of building all that infrastructure yourself.
That's not the case for you, or for me, and that's fine. You've described some of the reasons I also prefer a stable well-supported distribution and don't use Gentoo. My reading of your comment is saying that because you personally have no use for the benefits, therefore Gentoo is completely unsuitable for any production use ever.
If I've misread your comment, and you were just commenting on your personal use cases without trying to speak to any general audience, I apologize for my mischaracterization. It depends on the application. I can easily imagine supercomputers running Gentoo, since Gentoo lets you build the world with risky optimization flags that just might work for you. I can also imagine high-security environments using Gentoo because Gentoo lets you eliminate unnecessary dependencies that may be a security risk.
But honestly, I think most people who run Gentoo do it for the learning experience and for fun. Very customized flags required.
I was more talking about typical backend services, like Ceph or, say, a Riak or Postgres cluster. You can get source rpms for say Centos or Scientific Linux and maintain your own set of patches and flags. Minimise your deviation from the stable stuff that everyone else is using.
Which I expect is more common in super computers. But still, maybe there is some stuff with special processors that needs all to be compiled specifically with support for that type of thing, in order to make proper use of the underlying machine. A lot of companies know that Google and Facebook have their own distros. Ergo, to become as successful, they too must build their own distro.
I know this comment was probably sarcastic, but it's also a good teachable moment: what did those huge companies with heavily customized distros base their distros on before they started customizing? The stability and stability-emphasizing philosophy of those original base distros will permeate customizations for years to come. This hasn't stopped Google from using a Debian variant internally as a desktop OS, so they all kind of have their place depending on what you intend to build.
Thank you for this information. The command is customizable with many options and modifiers. The emerge tool is the most important utility for accessing the features of Portage from the command line. It is primarily used for installing packages, and emerge can automatically handle any dependencies a desired package has. How Gentoo configures software Gentoo Linux gives allows you to control how, and with what support, programs are installed by using USE flags to describe how software should be installed.
Use flags allow you to enable or disable certain features of a package. The documentation in Gentoo is extremely good. It usually tells you exactly what you need to know.
It will tell you which kernel modules you need to add and which USE flags to add. Gentoo documentation provide a step-by-step process to installing, updating, or troubleshooting your computer. Gentoo community is friendly and helpful, especially to those who help themselves, and the forums are busy with useful information.
The culture is not to hold your hand, but to walk you through the process with useful documentation. Gentoo users are noob friendly, and helpful.
The community is one of the best things about Gentoo. Gentoo and its derivatives are less well known than Ubuntu , Debian or Red Hat and their derivatives because they receive less publicity, and appeal to a different audience. In conclusion, Gentoo is not about ease of use or making installation easier for the new user.
It is for the hackers and delvers who want to explore and dive into their systems and swim a little bit further and faster. Gentoo IS for new users. I started off my carrier with Gentoo Linux. My experience is wonderful starting from customized kernel compilation to the packages management.
I used to install only what is required. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The project's aim is to provide a community supported production-grade enterprise operating system. Also, I dont have much time till April now. LFS demands a lot of time to get things in order.
Gentoo is really a convenient way to do something like LFS. I personally dont feel much difference. I might do a post on my experience as well. No promises though. Much being said, that was all about how I got into things. I wanted to share this with the community. One thing that I do want to point out is with linux, you gotta have your own opinion, and the best way is to try out things yourself.
Now this might be a conclusion from someone who has not even booted the Gentoo live CD, or someone who is experienced enough and Gentoo makes things difficult for his work.
This is something I realised very recently. This is really weird as its coming from me, but in the end, I realised it. The goal was to create a distribution without precompiled binaries that was tuned to the hardware and only included required programs.
Gentoo appeals to Linux users who want full control of the software that is installed and running on their computer.
People who are prepared to invest the time required to configure and tune a Gentoo system can build very efficient desktops and servers. Gentoo encourages users to build a Linux kernel tailored to their particular hardware. It allows very fine control of which services are installed and running; also, memory usage can be reduced, compared to other distributions, by omitting unnecessary kernel features and services.
Alright, so you now know that Gentoo allows you to have a lot of control over how your system works and behaves. With Gentoo, you only include the things you need. Things like genkernel which automatically build a kernel for you still include a lot of unnecessary options, and leave out some important ones.
This will surely require more time and effort. You can also skip this configuration part for now and do it later after installing the system. You can always reconfigure it and rebuild it. Instead of using genkernel, we can also manually build the kernel and its modules and install it.
The advantage with doing a custom build is that the speed of your system increases, you have a lightweight kernel, and you know the ins and outs of your system. As far as kernel modules are concerned, this is not a thing to worry about. Though things like your GPU drivers can be built-in, it really comes down to what you want in your robust custom kernel and what you want outside of it. Although its based on the traditional inits we all have been working with in the past, its pretty robust and simple to use.
Gentoo supports both systemd and OpenRC. It really comes down to personal preference. It has a support for a lot of things, going as far as a boot graph generator. OpenRC is simply an init. It divides services into different runlevels, the boot services like udev etc go into the boot or sysinit runlevel, the user services in the default runlevel, and the stopping of services and preparing for shutdown goes into the shutdown runlevel.
Pretty straightforward eh? Also, the systemd infrastructure isnt as easy to understand. Its a lot more complex. You do need a system logger sysklogd works out-of-the-box, syslog-ng is highly customisable, can send your logs to a server if configured to, and its my choice, metalog is also another good choice.
Having a cron daemon with logrotate as a cronjob is another good option, to flush out the old logs and keep things clean. Heh, now you must be thinking is that all Gentoo is about? You have the choice of building your programs from source, or downloading binaries this is done for really huge programs.
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