Hey, thanks for an interesting point of view! I mostly never compile from source, unless that’s some AUR package and it compiles everything on its own. I truly wants to try Gentoo some day (been postponing that for about two decades), but I always see my hardware as unworthy, of being too underpowered to compile everything I need. If I’d asked you to elaborate a bit, what would your suggestion be? Should I try Gentoo with compiling things for myself?
I want to get a used MacBook Air M1 as a secondary laptop (I’m eyeing one with some minor hardware issues, so it’d be somewhat affordable for a toy to play with). I thought of it, and I think I’d like to install Gentoo on it. I think this is the way, but perhaps you have some comments to that, or some advice.
Also, I remember when I used macOS, I used Mac ports, as brew has idiotic design when you have more than one user, which I had. Mac ports was compiling some things, I remember. But I think that’s different to what you say. More relevant thing, I think, would be, say, compiling a browser. I thought of attempting to compile a custom simplified Firefox on that imaginable (for now) MacBook Air machine, as I’m being irritated with so many features I don’t actually need. Say, the whole set of AI things, plus I really dislike options. Say, if I’m to use vertical tabs, I don’t need anything related to horizontal tabs, like at all. At this point I have no idea whether that’s trivial to remove things I never need and recompile, or whether that’s a separate hobby (if not a job) on its own, to catch up with the upstream.
That’s my whole point, you don’t need a whole distro to compile things. You can always compile things, that’s how distros get their packaged stuff in the first place. Compiling is the great equalizer. It compiles with whatever libraries your system already has. It doesn’t care what distro you have or what versions of things you’re using, as long as they work. And they usually do. Unless there’s some fundamental and likely recent incompatibility that hasn’t been upstreamed yet, which is rare.
Syncthing is written in go, which has its own library and compiling ecosystem and is relatively standardized and straightforward to compile. They walk you through the process here it should work on essentially every platform, even (and often especially) the weird non-standard ones that no other packaging format supports.
Hey, thanks for an interesting point of view! I mostly never compile from source, unless that’s some AUR package and it compiles everything on its own. I truly wants to try Gentoo some day (been postponing that for about two decades), but I always see my hardware as unworthy, of being too underpowered to compile everything I need. If I’d asked you to elaborate a bit, what would your suggestion be? Should I try Gentoo with compiling things for myself?
I want to get a used MacBook Air M1 as a secondary laptop (I’m eyeing one with some minor hardware issues, so it’d be somewhat affordable for a toy to play with). I thought of it, and I think I’d like to install Gentoo on it. I think this is the way, but perhaps you have some comments to that, or some advice.
Also, I remember when I used macOS, I used Mac ports, as brew has idiotic design when you have more than one user, which I had. Mac ports was compiling some things, I remember. But I think that’s different to what you say. More relevant thing, I think, would be, say, compiling a browser. I thought of attempting to compile a custom simplified Firefox on that imaginable (for now) MacBook Air machine, as I’m being irritated with so many features I don’t actually need. Say, the whole set of AI things, plus I really dislike options. Say, if I’m to use vertical tabs, I don’t need anything related to horizontal tabs, like at all. At this point I have no idea whether that’s trivial to remove things I never need and recompile, or whether that’s a separate hobby (if not a job) on its own, to catch up with the upstream.
That’s my whole point, you don’t need a whole distro to compile things. You can always compile things, that’s how distros get their packaged stuff in the first place. Compiling is the great equalizer. It compiles with whatever libraries your system already has. It doesn’t care what distro you have or what versions of things you’re using, as long as they work. And they usually do. Unless there’s some fundamental and likely recent incompatibility that hasn’t been upstreamed yet, which is rare.
Syncthing is written in go, which has its own library and compiling ecosystem and is relatively standardized and straightforward to compile. They walk you through the process here it should work on essentially every platform, even (and often especially) the weird non-standard ones that no other packaging format supports.