Gentoo desktop?

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2008 at 03:36:07PM -0500, Tyler Aviss wrote
> I've been a long-term Debian user, but though I do love apt, I tend to
> find that it falls short in some cases. In particular, I haven't been
> overly pleased with using an AMD64 desktop vs the packages available
> using IA32, even for newer Debian-derived distros such as Ubuntu.
> 
> Since I use my more powerful machine as part desktop, part workhouse,
> I'm interesting in switching to Gentoo as a desktop distro. I've heard
> good things about it in terms of performance server-wise, and am
> wondering if anyone has had much experience using it as a
> workstation/desktop (and as such, what's the availability of desktop
> software, media packages, etc like).

  Generally everything that's available for linux.  There are well over
12,000 apps/libs/etc (not counting different versions).  I don't know if
the mailing list would appreciate a 66 kbyte zip file of a listing of my
/etc/portage directory

> Any Gentoo desktop users out there?

  Me, me, me.  One word of warning; it's like a manual transmission.
You have more control than with an automatic.  If you floor the gas
pedal and leave it there, you'll blow up the engine.  Similarly, if you
make some stupid choices with Gentoo, it'll blow up on you.  Here are my
flags for my machine with an AMD CPU.

CFLAGS="-O2 -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer -march=athlon -m3dnow -mmmx -msse -msse2 -mfpmath=sse"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
MAKEOPTS="-j1"

  This gets the most out of the machine without going into "Gentoo Ricer
mode".  USE flags are a separate consideration, and depend heavily on
what you want to use the machine for.

  Up until this past summer, I used a 1999 Dell with a 450 mhz PIII, and
128 megs of main ram.  I used blackbox WM on it, and it was actually
quite reasonable.  Where it did run into problems was...
- stuttering and dropped frames with "internet TV"
- working on 2560x1920 digital photos with GIMP was "leisurely"
Everything else was almost as responsive as the "latest/greatest"
machine.  My motto is "I don't run desktops, I run applications".  I
tried GNOME and KDE a couple of times, and it was painfull.  I've stayed
with Blackbox mostly out of inertia.  It does what I need.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X Window user...  I'm an ex-Windows-user
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