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20200508-why-i-dislike-arch-and-gentoo.md (4625B)


      1 Why I dislike Arch and Gentoo
      2 ================================================================================
      3 
      4 Over the years, I have used many many Linux distributions. The reason I am
      5 now using a distribution maintained by me, is because I am never truly satisfied
      6 about other people's work. Not that they are bad at they do, it's just that
      7 they don't share the same vision as me. And I have felt this way with almost
      8 every distribution I have used.
      9 
     10 
     11 Arch Linux
     12 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     13 
     14 Arch Linux itself feels like it became a 'meme distribution'. Their user-base
     15 is a cult-like community that think they are superior for using Arch Linux.
     16 Now, you might be an Arch user, and might not be like this. I used Arch for
     17 a long time, and didn't feel this way, ever. I only see this level of cultism
     18 for Arch and systemd.
     19 
     20 If you ever call Arch bloated on an online community website, you will get
     21 lots of crap for it. But in fact, Arch Linux is bloated. Now this isn't due
     22 to having too many packages in the base installation. This is because of their
     23 packaging of software.
     24 
     25 Arch enables almost every single option in the package configuration, meaning
     26 lots of unnecessary dependencies, and packages with humongous sizes.
     27 
     28 Pacman is a rather slow package manager, and missing alternatives. For me,
     29 an alternatives system is a must.
     30 
     31 If you want to use a better binary distribution, use Void Linux. They have
     32 saner package configurations, and the environment just feels more UNIXy. xbps
     33 is really fast, and has an alternatives system.
     34 
     35 
     36 Gentoo Linux
     37 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     38 
     39 This will be the longer part, because my dislike for Gentoo is bigger than
     40 my dislike towards Arch. If you want to see how NOT to maintain a distribution,
     41 check out Gentoo.
     42    
     43 I've used Gentoo for a few months, and I'm saying this right out of the
     44 gate. Portage is the slowest piece of software that I have ever used on
     45 Linux. Maybe that's because I deliberately avoid software using Python,
     46 but Portage is most probably the slowest package manager that is being
     47 used.
     48 
     49 Portage depends on Bash, Python, and GNU wget. I have got a line count from
     50 `cloc`, doing a `find . \( -name '*.sh -o -name '*.py' \) -exec cloc {} +`.
     51 The source code of just `*.sh` and `*.py` files are over 100k lines of code.
     52 Then I got curious and runned cloc against the whole repository. Here is
     53 the output.
     54 
     55 ```
     56 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     57 Language                      files          blank        comment           code
     58 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     59 Python                          703          20009          21411         102180
     60 Bourne Shell                     13            643            678           3911
     61 Bourne Again Shell               44            583            434           3172
     62 diff                             17             31            298            574
     63 YAML                              6             32             80            573
     64 XSD                               1             27             27            494
     65 C                                 2             56            128            291
     66 make                              1              7              6             19
     67 INI                               1              1              0             15
     68 reStructuredText                  1              5              4              9
     69 XSLT                              1              0              0              5
     70 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     71 SUM:                            790          21394          23066         111243
     72 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     73 ```
     74 
     75 That's quite a lot.
     76 
     77 Portage is a package manager that tries to ease the configuration process of
     78 packages, but at the process makes it terribly complex to compose packages,
     79 and adds billions of portage configuration options. Configuring your first
     80 kernel is literally easier than configuring portage in a way you want. Users
     81 just do not know that they would be better off doing an LFS build for a much
     82 stabler system. My system was broken countless times while using Gentoo.
     83 Maintaining a Gentoo system is honestly harder than maintaining my own
     84 distribution.
     85 
     86 **EAPI**, probably the worst thing about the Portage ecosystem. It is the most
     87 complex, hard to read, hard to learn packaging system ever made. Creating a
     88 USE flag system shouldn't have been this hard.