Got a massive jump start to my career by spending high school recompiling X11 and such endlessly.
I have much gratitude for how much I learned. Apple had made great money in my desire to never do that again.
I have much gratitude for how much I learned. Apple had made great money in my desire to never do that again.
The typical use case is when you have to work on some Linux dev box which does not have any (or a somewhat recent) X11 and the distribution is either too old to get one, or simply you're not root.
In these cases, the simplest (though annoying) solution is to rebuild X11 and a wm from source on the box as user.
Given OP mentioned he was doing his studies, I guess he was required to work on some old boxes and wanted a decent modern environment.
Maybe I misremember, but didn't X11 require the SUID bit set before systemd-logind if you wanted to use a GPU?
(Of course, if you want to run remote X11 clients, then you don't need elevated privileges.)
Compiz times with the cube desktop and compiling kernels overnight in my Pentium 4 kept me away from making out with girls many times.
Eventually, you'd get tired of all the options and switch to something more stable, especially for servers. I have some fond memories of Gentoo and emerge and compiling all of my software, just so. Sadly, it was never very stable... and not really through any fault of it's own. Really, the customization you could do was great... but there was always one more thing to tweak, one more knob to turn...
Badge of honor -- yes. I'd almost call it a requirement for someone to work through once or twice.
Because watching 'configure' output scroll across your screen 40 times makes one a computer expert, natch.
Imagine starting out with Linux today and not knowing that systemd isn't the only option for an init system. (Regardless of whether or not you like it, it's helpful to know what alternatives exist).
In the end, with Gentoo, when you had your config set, yes, you'd get hours of compiler messages. And if you were lucky, none of them would be errors.
But you'd also know how the system worked. Honestly, it was also about control. With Gentoo, you could configure the system exactly as you wanted, down to the compiler flags. How many other systems let you really do that? Instead of targeting a well-known arch (ex: i686), Gentoo let you set your compiler flags for the entire system to match your exact CPU. The upside was that it was your system. The downside was that it was your system and if/when it broke, you'd have to figure it out. If your goal is to learn how to use Linux, that's also a feature. If your goal is to have a stable server, not so much.
Like the original parent commenter, I was playing with Gentoo back in the early 2000's, so much has probably changed. But I definitely learned a lot back then.
> With Gentoo, you could configure the system exactly as you wanted, down to the compiler flags.
This doesn't give you the control you think it does. Most of the customization you refer to is basically adding a USE flag to make.conf and running "emerge whatever" again, which I maintain isn't much of a teaching tool.
You end up learning about Gentoo, not software, compilers, operating systems, or computers.
> Instead of targeting a well-known arch (ex: i686), Gentoo let you set your compiler flags for the entire system to match your exact CPU.
This is a good example. So many people ended up thinking (incorrectly!) that this benefited them in some meaningful way, and thought that they were learning and customizing, when they still don't know, even a decade on, that '-O2' and '-O3 -march=native' are for almost all tasks indistinguishable from a performance standpoint or how to even go about measuring the difference.
Gentoo is like a show on the History Channel: it sure feels like you're learning!
Now I use Macs on the desktop and linux on the server.
All I really wanted at the time was a Photoshop clone (GIMP). Broke high schooler that didn’t want to pirate.
A Linux Mint install normally consists of a friendly gui installer followed by installing common software from an app store interface. It's more friendly than installing windows.
When's the last time you installed windows? I installed w10 about 3 weeks ago and I: - Plugged a USB key & Ethernet cable into my PC - clicked through a handful of GUI options - Made a coffee
And when I returned (~15 minutes, I didn't time it), it had installed windows, done the post-install reboot crap, and was ready for me to install my own software. Out of the box I had internet connectivity, power management, semi-modern graphics drivers (< 3 months old) and was ready to rock.
Going through the recovery tools built into windows was pretty easy but nothing including "refreshing" the OS which is basically just a reinstall while saving your files didn't work either and ultimately I had to just start from scratch.
When I did the reinstall I decided to switch it from legacy to EUFI boot and enabled that. The installation of windows tried to get me to link my account with my imaginary microsoft account. Opting out of that is designed to be confusing. Then it tried to get me to enable invasive telemetry with promises of functionality I didn't care about. It wouldn't have worked anyway because without changing another peripherally related option in my motherboards settings menu windows consistently malfunctioned when enabling networking in a way that was not an issue under Linux. One hour later thinking I had somehow created the windows install usb with the wrong option I figured out what was wrong and finally had windows working again.
In the course of 6 months windows had to be installed twice and took over 2 hours total time and tried to trick me into tying my ability to use my own computer to their permission and giving up my privacy.
The only reason I bother to keep it around is that its still easier to game under Windows. Might as well call it XboxOS because its surely unsuitable for any other use.