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Discussion on: Au Revoir, Gentoo - Sell Me A New Linux Distro

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techcodenet • Edited

Not sure how you missed Gentoo derivatives like calculate-linux.org/en/

After trying Sabayon long time ago - I quickly gave up on it's promise of "It's Gentoo, but with binaries", mostly because it's not really Gentoo if you can't use emerge/portage.

Then some ~3 years back I gave Calculate a try and haven't looked back.

Yes occasionally even it's mighty cl-update (cron friendly though I keep doing it only manually for no good reason) will run into situation where several things all align (switch to 17.1 profile, old portage/emerge, old python) needing some manual attention.

Even then it's only dealing with blockers/masked packages, and still mostly pulling in binaries.

And if at this point you're looking for even more YOLO thing...

Simply use cl-install that by default does automatic flip/flop between two root partitions (kind of like having two BIOSes on motherboards or routers).

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Ben Lovy

Actually, I wasn't really aware of Calculate, only Sabayon, which I'd written off already for exactly the same reason. Will definitely take a closer look, it's good to know you're having a positive experience.

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techcodenet • Edited

At this point I'm also not sure how I've ran across it myself.

Use flags binaries are built with are IMHO almost completely spot on - to the point where even CUPS automatically finds and configures network printers in corporate settings.

Only time I really wished it did things differently was remotely installing it on Hetzner dedicated server. And that was only because their software KVM mounting custom ISO was not really working and calculate doesn't provide Stage3.

On the other hand it's exactly because of that I know Calculate is "real Gentoo".

Starting with Stage3 it's a matter of setting some Layman repos, installing a few packages and your stock Gentoo becomes Calculate.

PS: Only packages/flags I override are:

# because one shouldn't use ithreads in Perl5
dev-lang/perl -ithreads

# Don't recall what/why, might not need it anymore
net-im/pidgin gtk

# For places where it's not yet NginX and each domain has separate user/account and there's suexec/plack/mod_fastcgi
www-servers/apache suexec -threads
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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Don't recall what/why, might not need it anymore

My Gentoo installation, in a sentence... :)