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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

I used Gentoo for a while, but the temptation to endlessly fiddle with everything always let me to eventually break the system. (It's not Gentoo's fault, it's mine.)

Afterwards I moved to ArchLinux, and that has been mostly fine for me.

If you are using a fairly standard processor, then Gentoo shouldn't give you that much of an advantage?

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Gentoo lets you do all of the tweaks mentioned here within the system package manager, so you still get security updates for your tweaked build. You can also install Gentoo on top of another system via Gentoo Prefix for use as a userland packages manager:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Prefix

> Gentoo lets you do all of the tweaks mentioned here within the system package manager, so you still get security updates for your tweaked build.

Yes, Gentoo is great. I'm just saying that for me it was too much of a temptation.

I'd like to bring attention to the ALHP repos[1].

These are the Arch packages built for x86-64-v2, x86-64-v3 and x86-64-v4, which are basically names for different sets of x86-64 extensions. Selecting the highest level supported by your processor should get you most of the way to -march=native, without the hassle of compiling it yourself.

It also enables -O3 and LTO for all packages.

[1]: https://github.com/an0nfunc/ALHP

Nice, I'll try them out!

LTO is great, but I have my doubts about -O3 (vs the more conservative -O2).

UPDATE: bah, ALHP repos don't support the nvidia drivers. And I don't want to muck around with setting everything up again.

Another update: I moved to nvidia-open, so now I can try the suggested repos.

All in under 2 hours. You were totally nerd-sniped.

Well, I moved to the new repos. But I had to change to the dkms drivers.

Seems to work so far, but nothing 'feels' faster either.

You should be able to use the regular arch repos as a fallback (and even repos from alhp with a lower feature level https://somegit.dev/ALHP/ALHP.GO/issues/255#issuecomment-333...)

doing this should allow you to use as many optimized packages as possible while still being able to install packages not supported by the alhp

I've broken Arch but never broken Gentoo. I think this more due to the fact I ran Arch first and you then Gentoo first, rather than any real difference between them.

Gentoo is more stable than Arch by default, though. It's not actually a bleeding edge distro, but you can choose to run it that way if you wish. Gentoo is about choice.

> I think this more due to the fact I ran Arch first and you then Gentoo first, rather than any real difference between them.

I can believe that.

> Gentoo is more stable than Arch by default, though. It's not actually a bleeding edge distro, but you can choose to run it that way if you wish. Gentoo is about choice.

I actually had way more trouble with stuff breaking with Ubuntu. That's because every six months, when I did the distro upgrade, lots of stuff broke at once and it was hard to do root cause analysis.

With a rolling distribution, it's usually only one thing breaking at a time.

Ubuntu et al. are notorious for breaking stuff. If you want to remove a package, it sometimes want to delete your Linux kernel. :|

I have used Gentoo and Arch. I still favor Arch, however. I like pacman (C), I don't like Portage (Python).

I found Arch Linux to be more stable than Gentoo, but that is just my own experience.

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