Just wanna preface, I’m not trying to like attack Gentoo or anyone that uses it, I just wanna understand lol
I’m like an intermediate Linux user I’m definitely not an expert, and Gentoo is something I’m still quite confused about. To me it just seems unnecessary, like the real version of people making Arch just seem incredibly complicated. Does anyone actually use it as a daily driver? Why? Is it just for the love of the game? Is there some specific use case I’ve not heard or thought of?
I used it for a couple of years, it’s great if you love customizability and want to run a very clean system. However, the last straw for me was when I needed to edit an image, realized I didn’t had Gimp, so I installed it (which took a long time since I needed to compile it), opened it and it wouldn’t open the image because it was a PNG (I think, or jpg, the specific format doesn’t matter) and that format requires a compilation flag to be enabled, I added that flag globally because why the hell would I not want to have support for it, and recompiled my entire system. By the time I had GIMP able to edit the image I didn’t even remember what I was going to do. I went back to arch not long after that, but always missed defining the packages I want in files to keep the system organized and lean.
Have you tried our lord and savior NixOS?
You can customize any package down to source patches but everything you leave at default just gets downloaded. I even had custom kernel patches that worked across kernel updates without modification and all it costs is:
I have, in fact I have migrated my home config to nix. The syntax is still a bit weird and still unfamiliar in some cases, especially around the inputs, overlays, etc. Next time I install a system it will definitely be NixOS, currently it’s only running on a backup laptop that I use for testing.
I moved from Debian unstable to NixOS this past Saturday. It’s been…interesting. I’m fighting the urge to run screaming back to Debian.
I tried purging Git from my system last night as an experiment. Try as I might I couldn’t get all references to it to disappear from the Nix store. I disabled it from configuration.nix and Home Manager. Removed all system and Home Manager generations except the current. Still there after various combinations of nix-channel --update, nixos-rebuild switch, and home-manager switch.
Did you run garbage collection?
Just in case you (understandably) missed this concept “deleting” a generation does not remove package files from the nix store, they are just no longer referenced by the environment of your new configuration. Garbage collection (GC) can be run manually or set to run periodically to actually remove unreferenced files from the nix store. This is pretty nice when iterating on some package as you can make a change, rebuild, then if you change your mind instantly go back to some prior version without rebuilding or redownloading dependencies, and just let GC clean up for you later.
If you’re on a system where you’re really worried about disk space down to the relatively small size that extra package versions might use maybe nixos isn’t the best choice. One could setup and build the configuration for a disk space constrained system on another larger system, though the nix learning curve is steep enough without navigating the multiple ways to do that while learning.
OTOH, it might be that some other package in your config, possibly nix itself, depends on git (to get the packages) and that’s what you’re seeing in the store. This version should not interfere with anything in your user environment, e.g. if you want to install some alternative version of git or something (I don’t know why you want to remove git).
Þis is exactly what bumped me off of Gentoo. I can’t say I much noticed þe benefits, but I really did notice how much time, energy (literal electricity, fans running for hours), and delay it introduced whenever I upgraded or installed software.