I’d be interested in tests across hardware of different ages (but as others have said, same/similar DEs/WMs/compositors as much as possible, please). While I have no proof, I’d guess that Wayland is making assumptions that would make it less efficient on some older kit.
Exactly. I mean, I like OpenSCAD, but there are things that are effectively impossible to do in it that are easy with a more visual piece of modelling software. Good for utility parts that need precise tolerances, not so good for dragon statues.
Traditionally, “freezing” means that the system doesn’t respond at all. More than likely, your system is just swapping heavily and slowing down to a crawl. If that’s what’s happening, the hard drive activity light will be on constantly.
The best fix for this is more memory, but RAM is currently expensive. If you can’t afford to buy more, you may have to try to cope in software. First, do The Bleeding Obvious: close any programs that you don’t immediately need before you start that Discord call. This includes not leaving unnecessary webpages open, just in case.
See what your distro has to say about swappiness and how to set it. You probably want a value lower than the default 60, maybe even as low as 0.
If it gets worse over tme, it’s possible that something you’re running has a memory leak. You may be able to figure out what using top or similar and seeing which programs’ memory use grows over time. Restarting the greedy ones periodically may be able to keep your system from bogging down, at the cost of some inconvenience.
Moving to a bare compositor rather than the relatively heavyweight KDE might also free up some RAM, but I’m not sure how much that will actually help.
Yes, precompiled packages are available, although only for 1-2 common combinations of USE flags per package.
To get rid of the vulnerability, just blacklist the Open vSwitch kernel module if, for whatever reason, you have it installed. As far as I can tell, you probably don’t need it unless the machine in question is acting as a switch or router.
No need for an urgent kernel update this time.
Okay, so did they account for the bots that claim to be Windows PCs? (I’ll bet there are still some running around that identify themselves as IE 6, although those may finally no longer be the majority of all bots.)
Try blacklisting sof-audio-pci-intel-cnl and see if you can get snd_hda_intel to load instead. The one time I tried the sof- driver, I couldn’t get it to work.
Depends on whether you’re talking about additive or subtractive colour. Yellow is primary in a subtractive system, but not an additive one.
Most of its functionality is just reimplementing things that already existed, with an incompatible interface.
Still works once you can get it to connect, though. The catch is that connecting can take several tries. Probably better to use remmina unless there’s a bug in freerdp that’s causing problems for your use case (rdesktop is, I believe, the only Linux rdp client that uses its own protocol implementation instead of the freerdp library).
I like Aqualung. Works well enough for what I do. Has the slightly unusual feature of accepting LADSPA plugins. I don’t do much tag editing, but the basic functions are there.
I guess at the very least I’ll single out my graphic drivers (Intel)?
You shouldn’t need to concern yourself about this until you’re looking to install X or wayland (at which time you’ll want to put VIDEO_CARDS="intel i915" or similar in make.conf—read the wiki to see which drivers match your specific chipset; my example stanza is for a Kaby Lake system). The basic drivers should autoload unless you compiled a custom kernel and left them out by mistake.
Any advice from people that already use Gentoo? Especially things that they wish they knew before trying for the first time?
This is more things-about-bootloaders I wished I’d known/remembered when installing more recent systems, but:
How much time and effort should I put into fine tuning the global USE flags if my initial goal is to get a system up and running?
Not much, unless there’s something you really want to exclude (-systemd, for instance). Most of the time the default USE flags will give you a workable, feature-rich system (and allow you to use more binary packages).
What you need to pay attention to is your choice of profile, which sets your default USE flags. Profiles in the desktop series enable a lot of USE flags. For the most basic command-line system, you’re better off picking default/linux/amd64/23.0 (or default/linux/amd64/23.0/split-usr if you want the old FHS setup where /bin and /usr/bin etc. are different directories—if you don’t care about this, stick with the default and ignore split-usr). Avoid no-multilib, hardened, and anything marked “(exp)” or “(dev)” unless you have some specific reason for wanting that profile.
With systemd, I enable --nowed that which I wanted to “autostart” (iptables and sshd, for instance). Is there an equally intuitive counterpart with OpenRC?
I think you want the rc-update command, specifically rc-update add [service] default (assuming you want the default runlevel, which you nearly always do). There’s a man page.
regionset’s homepage appears to have disappeared. If your distro no longer packages it, the source can still be obtained from Gentoo source mirrors (pick a server here and go into “distfiles” then “8b”).
Because even a headless server with no email capability can write to a log, as long as it can mount its root drive.
That being said, if your system is hiding stuff behind some kind of splash screen at boot time, turn it off. I suspect your error would have been right there on screen in plain white-on-black text if it had happened on one of my systems (granted, I use OpenRC and not systemd, but I expect the latter also provides a running commentary on what it’s doing at boot until the graphics stack loads).
noauto, which means that the filesystem in question won’t mount until you issue an explicit mount command for it, can be an alternative to nofail in fstab. Back in the days of optical drives, that used to be one of the options you put on them.
For external (and network) drives, though, I find it’s better to hand the problem over to autofs (which will mount the filesystem only when you try to access it) and keep them out of fstab.
You can try just tracking down Akonadi’s executable and removing its executable mark or renaming it, which may, however, break other stuff (in particular, make sure you’re not running kmail—it seems to be the most substantial program with a non-optional dependency). Or you can ditch KDE and move to a lighter DE that doesn’t have this stuff (TDE, Mate, XFCE . . .)
There are two ways to spin up a Linux machine: you can either use a desktop-ready distribution that includes everything you need to use it right away (including some stuff you don’t want), or you can start with the bare bones and build it up to usability. If you want to take the second philosophy to the extreme, Gentoo will let you turn off all optional features you don’t want before they’re even built.
X11 is still being actively maintained. It isn’t an install risk or anything like that. It isn’t going to add any shiny new features, but not everyone needs shiny new features. (That being said, if Wayland works for you, go ahead and use it. Just don’t spread FUD, please.)
Even better, store the password offsite—safe at a friend’s house, safety deposit box at the bank . . .
I’d be more impressed if they stopped bundling random crap. It’s their unwillingness to use upstream’s dependencies and toolchains that makes Chromium a nightmare to package on Gentoo, and flatpaks are not going to fix that. They bundle clang, rust, and so many additional libraries that the “must keep bundled version to prevent breakage” list is almost 300 items long. This is not the correct way to ensure reproducibility, guys.