Quoting: Avehicle7887I've started to hit a few walls recently and it's requiring me to learn new stuff.

Do you have some examples?

Quoting: Cyril

Quoting: Avehicle7887I've started to hit a few walls recently and it's requiring me to learn new stuff.

Do you have some examples?

The Nvidia NVK driver comes to mind where it requires a more recent version of Rust than my system does. Another example would be the OpenMW engine requiring a modern version of Qt. Both of these 2 examples require me to compile the Rust and Qt toolchains themselves before attempting to compile the projects depending on them. I'm yet to succeed with these 2

For the most part it's just a matter of integrating newer libraries into the system before compiling the actual project. Getting newer Mesa drivers on this system was probably the biggest of them all. I had to compile (LLVM toolchain, newer GCC, newer Python as well as some small libraries which Mesa depends on). As of recently I had to learn how to properly compile, configure and integrate a newer version of Xorg server as it was too old to run the Zink driver.

I could do away with all of this by installing a modern distro or a rolling release version, however I wouldn't learn much doing so.

Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 3 August 2024 at 11:19 am UTC

As a noob that used Linux since June 18 i use Fedora Linux KDE Plasma. Because it looks like Windows and it's up-to-date and stable at the same time. It's same as Windows for me.

I'm still on Gentoo since my switch a year ago. But.. I have to say.. it is the best distro I have ever used, so flexible. I really love this thing and it's genuinely given me back my enthusiasm for the technical aspects of linux (that kind of faded off a bit due to all other distros very hand holding these days).

I Gentoo.

My best memories with Linux come from Mandrake. But that was years ago.

This is what it looked like:


Currently I'm using Fedora KDE on my desktops and laptops.

My SteamDecks are running SteamOS of course.

I recently built a custom retro machine using a Raspberry PI 5. I added a cooling solution to it and a m.2 ssd adapter so I could run Raspberry PI OS / KDE from it.

I put it in a transparent Amiga 500 case from a1200.net and cabled it up with a1200's accessories kit and some bits from Amazon.

From icomp.de I got a custom Keyrah board which allows original Amiga peripherals to be connected as USB devices. This way I could use an original Mitsumi keyboard from an Amiga 500 which fits the case. Also original joysticks can be connected now. I replaced the beige key caps with black ones from, again, a1200.net.

That's all I've got running at the moment.

Last edited by tfk on 4 October 2024 at 8:58 am UTC

I never had an Amiga but boy do those cases look cool! And the fact that they engineered them to take a Pi as a replacement CPU and be able to use the native keyboard is awesome.

Quoting: rcritI never had an Amiga but boy do those cases look cool! And the fact that they engineered them to take a Pi as a replacement CPU and be able to use the native keyboard is awesome.

Yeah. It was a nice project. You have multiple options of what to put in the case. Others put an actual a500 main board in. I choose a PI.

I have been using Gentoo for many years on several devices: my main desktop, laptop, and raspberry pi (the latter two via my own binhost), and my main server. (Though I do have some VM servers that are a mix of debian, alma, and arch, for friends who are learning linux (and server development) with them.) Before using Gentoo, I grew up with slackware and Red Hat Linux (pre-RHEL), the moved and contributed to Ubuntu when it was the new distro on the block. At some point I decided to try out gentoo since a father figure in my life had always been using it and it fascinated me when he'd tell me about things.

Gentoo has spoiled me thoroughly. I have tried several times to use another distribution on my laptop but seeing binary distros pull in packages I could easily avoid with `USE` flags makes me unreasonably grumpy. I've lost my tolerance for installing packages that are generically built for wide use-cases.

Lately I've been 'shopping round' looking for friendlier distributions for people in my life who are new to linux. So far it's been OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Pop_OS, Vanilla, and EndeavourOS, depending on the person and situation.

Quoting: SiinamonGentoo has spoiled me thoroughly. I have tried several times to use another distribution on my laptop but seeing binary distros pull in packages I could easily avoid with `USE` flags makes me unreasonably grumpy. I've lost my tolerance for installing packages that are generically built for wide use-cases.

Genuinely agree. I was used to distributions largely not being that way. But, once you dig into gentoo and start using these features (USE, SLOTs, custom profiles, etc) and all the other things... trying to use another distribution again just feels so restrictive, even Arch. I mean, one thing I love about it is you can set it up with say for example systemd and then just rip out systemd entirely and swap it with openrc and reboot to a working system. Take it back to systemd again after if you want, too all within the same installation - good luck doing that with any other distribution.

It also has a different mentality it's not "Oh? it's broken, well just reinstall." It's more "Oh? you broke it? Well chroot into it do this and that, reboot you'll have it working again.".

Like yourself, I manage many distributions for other reasons (servers, etc). But gentoo is definitely my go-to for my own usage now . I love this thing, I really do.

Suffice to say, Gentoo is great.

I'm going to stop fanboying now.

Last edited by BlackBloodRum on 11 October 2024 at 3:06 pm UTC