Install Gentoo
Oddly, Gentoo was where I started out when I got serious about using Linux. That was when I was in my 20’s and I wanted to get every last bit of performance out of my computer. Also, breaking stuff was fun and gave me a chance to figure new stuff out.
Now I just want stuff to work and be relatively up to date. So I use Debian testing.
I’ve found a good compromise between the two. I’ve disabled most of the desktop profile USE flags and I compile everything with -Ofast and LTO
Portage errors are uncommon, and build failures are easily fixed by disabling compilation flags from package.env. Build failures get less and less common as package.env grows (it’s currently at about 20 lines)
As for the kernel, I just started with a distribution kernel, disabled all modules and only enabled the ones that I need (this can automatically be done with make localmodconfig). These modules are built-in (so lsmod usually returns nothing)
I chose systemd because of the huge increase in boot speed
Compiling everything with LTO landed me in a situation where a bunch of packages fail to build because apparently having some LTO’d static libraries can cause issues.
I’m now going to start investigating where exactly the issue is. Trouble is, the package that was giving me errors, depended on a whole lot of static libraries, soooooo… Good luck to me.
Being an ultra-madlad, I used to also -ffast-math everything that didn’t fail, but because I didn’t know about package.env yet, I found it easier to just keep it off rather than turning it off and on again every time I needed to emerge something that failed because of it.
