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Comment by javert | Hacker News Reader

He's only listed three advantages that I can discern.

1. "but users of binary package management still install extra support for things they may never use."

2. Custom kernel with only what you need

3. "Even menial things such as choice of system logger and cron daemon can be chosen and configured exactly the way you want"

Why are those meaningful advantages? For example, if it makes my computer run faster, great, but does it? (I doubt it.)

Most of the other stuff is just giving major props to Portage... I mean yeah, I'm sure the "revdep-rebuild function" is great, but since I'm using a binary distro, I don't need it!

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I don't see why number 2 can't be done on any other distro. Nothing is stopping you from compiling your own kernel on any of them. Of coarse its rare that people would bother.

3 is also a feature of Arch. The problem is now you have to spend time setting that stuff up. More problematic is you have to actually know you need to set something up. Did you remember/bother to tweak, your ssd settings in fstab? Setup OpenAL for 3d sound? Your HDD IO schedular? Your TCP buffer settings? Your font renderers antialiasing? All that crap sould be taken care of (although admitidly distros don't seem to do things like setup SSD schedulers to deadline/nop.

1 seems a be redonculious. There is very little reason to really worry about having a few extra packages lying around as long as there not running stuff in the background. I think it's more for people with a case of OCD about their file system.

Regarding 1), and I realise this is anecdotal... I had a binary package manager install all of X11 and Gnome 2, simply 'cause I tried to install the svn command-line client. This was on a server-style box I only sshed into, with limited disk space and memory (128M, I think?).

... not that I could really run Gentoo on that either though.

> Did you remember/bother to tweak, your ssd settings in fstab?

I use Arch too, and no, I didn't think to do that. Thanks!

Instead of mounting your file system with discard, use cron to run the command "fstrim /path/on/ssd" daily. You won't have to pass the discard commands every time something is deleted, and instead only have the performance hit once a day.

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