Of course there may exist interpretations that bring your statement to the level of debatable, but if you keep them inexplicit, should the reader divinate?
Depends on what your goal is. If you want a useable OS, it's not worth the time. If you wish to learn about compilation and the "core" of Linux, then go for it
The outdated process is pointless. There are way too many rinse and repeat compilation steps. Focus the manual effort on the concepts that need to be taught and automate the rest. I feel like they make the default runbook overly tedious to give you a false sense of accomplishment.
> Even benchmarks showed Ubuntu was faster than Gentoo.
Source/details? I would easily believe that Ubuntu was nearly as fast, or perhaps even exactly as fast, but I can't think of any way for a custom-compiled program to be slower than a distro-provided binary.
I actually can't find exactly what I was searching for when making that comment, it may have been 10 or so years ago.
In my searching, did find this which shows trading blows with others... yet to see a comparison showing that compiling everything leads to performance gains...
In fairness, I'm sure Gentoo doesn't always win; assuming Ubuntu compiles with something like `-O2` and some lowest-common-denominator march/mtune, plenty of programs won't meaningfully use newer CPU features nor benefit from O3, or will barely benefit (below the noise floor of the benchmark). I mean, at the end of the day you're taking the same-ish programs and building them with the same-ish compilers; if the only difference is that one distro compiles for a newer exact CPU target, it'll win sometimes but not always. I was just surprised at the notion that it could ever lose, since anything Ubuntu could ask gcc to do, Gentoo could do just as well; unless it's something like Gentoo happening to lag a gcc version at the exact time of the comparison, it shouldn't be able to be worse than Ubuntu. (Unless you count the overhead of doing the compile, in which case it can be quite easy to beat:])
Bad benchmark possibly - Ubuntu presumably has some optimizations enabled by default, and portage could've been set to build with no optimizations (not used gentoo before, so I could be misunderstanding something).
Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time?
Boot time crossed my mind, too, but Gentoo is happy to run with systemd so that's not really "Gentoo vs Ubuntu" so much as "this exact variant of Gentoo vs default Ubuntu" which is kind of fair. (Assuming, of course, that OpenRC is slower to boot than systemd, which would also be an interesting benchmark)
Overdoing it does seem quite likely - if I didn't know and was trying to do a test I could easily see myself just enabling all the optimizations and moving on.
I would as well. My understanding is that SystemD does more parallelization/magic to decrease boot time, but is a bigger system to try to comprehend and has more surface in general.
I believe parallelization is a configurable option on OpenRC though, I'll add that test to the list to try some time.
> Could also be talking about boot time maybe - isn't SystemD supposed to boot faster than OpenRC much of the time?
The first time I switched to systemd, years ago (when Debian moved to systemd), I noticed the boot becoming much faster. So, yup, it was a thing. But now, years later, I got rid of systemd and honestly I don't see my system booting much slower. I mean: if Debian takes, say, 0.3s to show me the login prompt while Devuan (the Debian fork with all the systemd stuff stripped away) takes 0.4s, who cares...
(fwiw I always boot into text console, log in there, then manually launch the graphical display)
I don't think that the "faster boot time" is an argument in favor of systemd anymore, at least not on a modern system. And in case you need to spin a container in a heartbeat, you may be using some ultra minimal Linux distro like Alpine anyway.
