Hector Martin

Back when I switched my main Gentoo workstation from an Ivy Bridge laptop to a 2015 Skylake iMac last year, I cloned the OS and changed the hostname on the old one, but left packages alone. Now I just cleaned up the worldfile on the old machine. Depclean is removing 734 packages.

Honestly I should do most of that on my main machine too. Now that I have a binhost there's no reason to keep stuff I "might use some day" installed. Installing things is fast now.

Why gentoo out of curiosity?

Back in the day it was the only decent rolling-release distro, and today it's still one of the least intrusive and most flexible ones. Nowadays I mix Gentoo and Arch. I could probably live with Arch everywhere, but I find Gentoo's tools more mature.

Mix as in run both on different systems? Which tools do you find more mature? I've always struggled with Arch/build your own, type distros when it comes to a GUI environment, there's so many levers to tweak to get things working well. (Course wanting wayland doesn't help)

Really? The last Arch box I installed from scratch (some skylake HTPC I have upstairs) I just installed a bunch of packages and enabled sddm and got a fully working KDE Plasma desktop. Add more packages for features and that's about it.

I find Gentoo's configuration management and package handling more mature. Arch is more like "yeah you get to install the latest version of everything, and upgrades follow no rhyme nor reason and there is no way to mix versions of anything".

So basically I use Arch for boxes that only do a few things or that don't really have much long-term systems work put into them (more disposable), and I use Gentoo for my servers and main workstation.