Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
To show how moronic your claim was to term it as “most environmentally harmful OS” on one single factor(cpu time).
I think its better to have older machines that use more energy, than to have new ones that need resources, are worse repairable and all.
Could you explain “TPW” and “hw” in your comment? I read it as hardware, and having an OS force you to buy new (of their own) hardware is not sustainable at all. Its basically planned obsolescense.
Proove me wrong, but cant you securely boot a BIOS on any PC using their old TPM and a security key? I am in the procees of installing Heads on my T430, which is pretty old, but I think this will be very secure even without the new TPM standard.
I am in agreement with most if not all the above points. Didn’t agree with terming a distro the worst of anything based on a single metric.
~~ TPW~~ CPU TDP to use it as a rough efficiency metric. Probably not very accurate but roughly representative. HW meant hardware.
Maybe in many cases repurposing hardware makes sense but based on the source and cost of electricity, hw process generation it might not even be feasible to run compared to modern hw. Might be better to recycle them responsibly than keep those running.
In end I guess you realise there are many factors to consider to determine something good, bad.
Of course, hats why I said bad for the environment. If it was not rolling, maybe. But if you do updates at least twice a week it will consume lots or energy. If you use old hardware or not I think its independend from that.
Even assuming all other factors remain same sure it uses more power but by how much? Best case by how much do you expect the increase to be ? 5-10% of their daily electricity consumption ?
And when you consider the power source, hw efficiency and so on theres no way to assess what the environmental effect an OS has.
Also you are assuming behavior of the person remains the same when using a precompiled packages v. compiling their own. I’ve installed many sw just to try for a few minutes and remove just to try various options. If it takes hours to compile I’d be very picky on what I install.
Agree on the last. I also try a lot more packages. But its still rolling, in practice how many hours does your PC compile a week? Would be curious.
And I dont believe in the efficiency advantages or selfcompiled software vs. immense compiling power needed especially when rolling. On ESR maybe you got me. I really believe code thats made for one platform can be faster. But then you have MacOS which is slower than Arch on their own damn M1 hardware.