Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I’ve seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
Small sample set aside, the performance differences here are much bigger than I’ve seen in previous linux comparisons. Something has to be off right? Curious if anyone is able to reproduce these results.
Oh wow, Solus is something I have never heard of. Or even if I did, I don’t remember. I gave it a quick glance, I it’s a Linux distro, so nothing too niche, right? Why did you pick it? I’d really love to find some blogs where people write on their daily experience with some things Linux. (I’m trying to start one, we’ll see how it goes.)
MacBook Air M1, it should mostly work with Asahi Linux project. The hardware is really impressive. I thought of getting a modern ThinkPad instead, but it’s just an ugly heavy moist machine in comparison. From a laptop, I don’t need a tank. I have that tank in my primary desktop computer. A laptop is more of a lightweight toy to me. So that was my thinking behind the MacBook Air M1 running Gentoo idea. I expect it to be very well supported as it’s probably the best value you can get (assuming used, and assuming 10/10 repeatability is not a concern).
I have a used Microsoft Surface RT3 (they would become Go line with the next model) running Arch Linux. I don’t even consider that device to sport Gentoo. I’m not well versed with Gentoo, but I remember you can actually compile from another machine, so theoretically I can use Gentoo even on a Raspberry Pi (well, that Surface I mentioned isn’t really far from my Raspberry Pi 2B). But to get there, I need to learn all those things :) It’s more like a chicken and egg problem now. I have a somewhat powerful PC (if we can call a quad core Intel i7 that), which I could use as a Gentoo compile machine. But it runs Arch and it’s my primary machine, so migrating it to Gentoo would not be very easy.
Theoretically, an M1 Air is even more powerful than that. So, a perfect storm. All that is theoretical at this point though :)
Solus is something that I chose because the sane defaults are good at install. You can use Secure Boot if you want with the Linux Distro and you only need to enroll in MOK once at install, never worry about it again. It is a rolling release with weekly sync updates that are often fairly fast, depending on your internet speeds. The most I ever had to wait is 4 minutes for eopkg to download and install the updates, a simple reboot and I am into the latest Solus Linux version. Talking about eopkg, I like their custom package manager, it’s fast tells you everything you need to know, and doesn’t waste my time. Solus repos have quite a bit of software in them, you can also use Distrobox/Shelf, AppImage, Flatpak to shore up any deficiencies. It’s a general purpose distro that is a perfect daily driver. That will make it very difficult for me to test Gentoo on bare metal because I love Solus. Still, there is a lot of time for me to read and learn beforehand.
It seems like you have everything just about figured out for your plans, so that is good. I knew about Asahi Linux project…I have an aversion to Apple hardware because of my personal bias. I’d honestly want a Thinkpad or another kind of Windows Laptop to wipe clean of Windows. As while you like sleek and light laptops, I don’t mind a laptop with a bit of heft (love a good 17 inch screen laptop) I like having roomy keyboards and screens. Mostly to account for my shitty eyes being borked from birth LMAO, and my big hands. I find anything less than a 15 inch screen device to be cramped and it hurts my hands over time.
As for Gentoo compiling on another device, yep you can indeed do that. You just have to be sure to compile with the correct hardware in mind! It will be hard given your core desktop is running Arch and you don’t want to disturb the force at the moment by installing a distro you haven’t any practical experience with on it. That would be a trial by fire way of learning (I often do because as apparently my brain loves the adversity and frustration a lot).
Given that you’ve used Arch for years and have entire workflows attached to Arch, I would just get something relatively powerful and cheap to test Gentoo on, so you don’t have to compile the distro on another device. If you are testing, there is nothing wrong with keeping the compiling contained to the device in question. You’ll get the full experience and not sacrifice anything (since it would be easy to install another distro you’d like on the thing).
That way if anything goes wrong, you can do some reading on how to fix it on the other device, to troubleshoot. Whatever you decide, you naturally have all the time in the world to decide! Good luck on that.
Thanks! A great read it was! Do you have / plans to have a blog by the way? You write quite well and interesting to read.
See you around, have a great day.
Uh, I don’t blog regularly…Might do someday. Personally, the quality of my writing isn’t that great. I occasionally think before I type (got that goose on the loose energy). LMAO If I do end up writing more, I will put the blog link in my profile.
Blogging been a great help for me recently. In many aspects. I haven’t deployed mine yet, but it’s not far from it. I’d really recommend, especially if you learn something new. To each their own, but it looks like that’s the only proper way for me to learn.
It depends on the subject, often times I tend to learn better by simply doing or thinking through the process before actively attempting what I thought about. I am a weird mix of practical and book learner, I often just blog about daily life stuff or whatever has my immediate attention. A blog for me is like my current hyperfixation identifier. ROFL
For internal stuff, I tend to keep system documentation of all the changes that I made (directories, etc), the reason why I did it, how I did it, what steps did I have alter in order to complete the change. That also really helps because years down the line, this helps build my understanding of my personal system.
I like the way you formulate things. It’s similar similar to me, these periods of over fixation on something. Then something else. And I believe keeping these notes on Linux public is also helpful for both you and some (random or not) users. I try to avoid too personal information in the posts, but sometimes I think it doesn’t even matter. E.g. I was obfuscating some things like MAC addresses, then I thought what if I won’t, what would happen? Is there any attack surface? Still, I design this blogging system (my current hyper fixation) as to have most things public, with some private notes when necessary. As some bonus (or not), I have close to zero motivation to write for myself. Yet writing publicly or to someone is captivating and I have this motivation. Even in those cases when not many people read me. Or even when there’s nobody at all. Right now I have my blog on my Raspberry Pi, I want to polish some things here and there before deploying it publicly. And yet it’s truly interesting to work on, for some reason.
I wish more people would do that. I’d love to read some ‘life journey’ kind of honest blog of some total rando, given that person would write honestly and not hustling, trying to sell something to someone. But rather writing stupid ordinary things, their life reflections, that type of thing. I’m willing to have a blog like that for myself too. But I just cannot come up with the implementation: what should it be? Just a randomly generated domain? Should I obscure names and places? I thought of using some rare language (e.g. Finnish) to also support that language, learn it, and avoid having too many readers I don’t welcome. But that is trivial to translate, so I’m not really sure. I want both honest content and not being attacked personally (especially irl) by some people while expressing myself. Some content, like political, sometimes is not even safe to publish, depending on the topic and the whereabouts of the person. That’s some completely different topic, there are should be plenty of examples, but the indie web I explored was quite poor on that. Even to get some ideas. Perhaps, I may make more attempts on this. I don’t know.
Yeah, sorry:) have a great night, it’s late now here in my place.
Thank you, I guess because I stare at what I write all the time…It’s become boring and substandard in my opinion. It’s like looking at your own face for years, looks ordinary or bland because familiarity creates a lack of novelty! If you provide too much sensitive information it does raise the risk of someone being able to connect the dots and finding you. It does create an attack surface, but…They need to have all the parts in order to be able to act upon it. If the device is a local network thing that doesn’t connect to the internet…Small bits of info might not be so bad, but too much is not good.
I think hustle culture has destroyed a lot of the blogging scene with pushing products, services, etc. I really hate how authentic blogs have gone to the wayside and the hustle blogs have kinda taken over. Or worse the influencer blogs designed to sell you low quality tat are growing in scale and influence.
Yeah, deciding what a blog should be, its purpose, or how it should be implemented is very person. I would think on it, personally I am choosing a general purpose style. That focuses on variety stuff written from my perspective (occasionally flawed because yah know, people aren’t perfect). My Blog.
I think you can talk about all manner of subjects, whether they be controversial or otherwise provided you do it with care. Really think about the political posts carefully before you make them, as it is important to talk about politics, but doing it in a humane way matters. I think we’ve lost the art of the indie web since the commercialized, centralized website has become popular. I am even trying to rediscovering it by just trying shit and seeing it if works in practice. There is nothing wrong with a bit of live practice!