Getting rid of Windows -- Blood's list of Linux distros

So in an ironic twist, NVIDIA and NVIDIA-PRIME do not work on Devuan for a reason I am still trying to figure out... but on vanilla, SysD Debian it works flawlessly. Go figure.

I am not done with Devuan but I am baffled that the SysD version works flawlessly with NVIDIA and not the SysV one.

Maybe I will sacrifice Nobara and retry Devuan. Or maybe I will look for my next challenge.

Nvidia being a pita... What's new?

On Artix, Arch, Nobara, Void, FreeBSD, GhostBSD, Debian and many others it is a simple, straightforward install without hassle.
But I would hazard a guess that the NVIDIA drivers in the Devuan repos are simply downstream Debian and did not have the SystemD dependency stripped out and replaced with one that allows it to run on other init systems, in Devuan's case, SysV.

Debian and Devuan are identical systems, only difference being Debian uses SystemD and Devuan does not. I got it running perfectly on Debian including NVIDIA-Prime so there's no reason why it shouldn't run on Devuan. It's what I am trying to figure out.

Devuan is a great distro and I am liking it and Debian more than I thought I would. But like other distros sometimes you have to work through issues.

The more distros I am familiar with, the more efficient I can be. Artix is my darling, Void I am working on to get Steam running, Nobara is just and Debian is the primordial ooze so to speak.

ATM, my 1TB HDD is a quadboot of Artix, Nobara, Void and Debian. I will reattempt Devuan on another HDD.

So I finally cleared the last hurdle I had with Void -- Steam. It was technical and fucky but turns out if there is a mismatch between the proprietary NVIDIA drivers and the MESA drivers (for 32 bit needed by Steam) then there are issues. Plus there's other 32bit libs needing install also. 

But I got it done. Void is running idle ar 475MB RAM and 1.1 with Steam running. It is quite incredible. 

Soooo time to hold funeral rites for Nobara and Debian which are no longer needed. Artix remains because of the AUR.

Congrats! 475MB is pretty nice.

Considering Artix idles at 837MB w/kernel 6.2.2... yeah Void is hell slim. I'm gonna try on my Intel SSD on the MacBook Pro which now has an insane 12GB of RAM, absolute overkill for a 2012 machine.
BTW, there's been two major Redcore upgrades. Fire up Sisyphus sometime and update as there's a lot of stuff updated I hear.
I also want to dabble with Venom, another source based distro. But there's so little documentation on it it's hard to...

I am actually insane enough that I am doing Gentoo. Stay tuned...

Best of luck, you may need it.

I will say this, it certainly has changed a LOT since my last take on it back in 2006.

It's not this impossible mystical experience it's made out to be, but it definitively is a labour of skill and patience. Being a source distro, Gentoo entails a LOT of compiling. The poor dual-cire, quad-thread Core i5 in my 2012 MacBook pro got properly put through the washer I'll say this much

@World emerge is done, kernel is compiled, which are the two longest steps there is. Now that's done I just need to do a bit of wrapping up, polishing and tweaking a few things.

Neofetch to come in a few days I suppose if all goes well.

One thing I will say is, USE flags in Gentoo are extremely annoying, but also extremely powerful. Once I am done I am gonna clone the shit out of this install and I am never deleting it. Too much work went in it.

Phew. I will say this, as hard as I remembered it and extremely fiddly. But, once done, this is solid as fuck.

Emerging KDE now. Gonna have a DE soon and next up is Steam. I wish they still asked their hardware survey, just so I can show off the rarest Linux distro out in the wild.

Now I look down at the Arch peasants. Only the LFS (Linux from Scratch the absolute last level of insanity) look down on us.

I will get to LFS. Just wait.

Spoiler:

Sometimes being a lowly peasant feels good.

I get the ease of use and convenience of prebuilt, precooked, prepackaged distros and if that's your thing, more power to you mate.

But, Gentoo is a bonding experience with your hardware and forces you to delve into the deepest parts of Linux's inner workings and fix shite I didn't had to worry about even with Arch.

KDE Plasma ran, but it was missing so many applications it was not even funny, I didn't even have a bloody terminal! And it took so stupidly long to compile... nearly 600 packages for a bloated incomplete pile of toot.

Xfce was less than 50. Much better.

USE flags are a major annoyance but the most powerful tools of Gentoo also.

So in short, Gentoo is like a super fine tuned sports car that is a pain in the arse to maintain, but offers you unprecedented performance, being perfectly tuned for your hardware.

Spoiler:

And here's the final result for the Gentoo build, complete with a customized Xfce and terminal.
RAM at 2.1GB because I was compiling.

I can see the matrix!

Yes. I love that theme. I wasn't expecting it to run out of the box on Gentoo because usually it complains about a missing unzipper, but it just... worked.

This is on my MacBook Pro, my secondary machine. Tomorrow, I am cranking it up to 11 and installing on my main machine, Acer Nitro 5. A quad-core, octo-thread should have less of a marathon compiling. Plus, with my make.conf as reference I can just copy over my USE flags and avoid some unnecessary tinkering with Portage.

Like I said, Gentoo is THE ultimate Linux experience. I had to do a lot of reading and troubleshooting to fix issues but again, like I said, Gentoo makes you deal with things Arch and others would automatically handle and is one hell of a learning experience.

Now that I have done Gentoo, I don't think I could go back to any other distro. Gentoo is so lightning-fast and fine-tuned that everything else feels like an exercise in futility, basically.
(Intentional Mgla reference )

Wiped both Artix and Void, and Gentoo is now compiling. I expect a few challenges with bloody Optimus but it will be what it will be.

I took the slightly cheaty route and copied my Portage make.conf from my Mac. Contains all my mirrors, IDE, Rust, FDD and other flags plus mirrors for downloads and DNS information.

If it wasn't for all the compiling, I would have mastered the 15min Gentoo install

I used JFS this time around. XFS is especially powerful and quick with large files but loses out on smaller files.
JFS is well rounded and better suited for laptops.
I wanted to go Reiser, but it's been flagged as deprecated since kernel 5.18 and is set to be dropped out completely in 2025. Oh well.

Compiling the base system will run overnight. Hopefully in a few days I have a fully functional Gentoo in my main machine.

Right so after some compiling clusterfuck I went the route of cloning my Gentoo install.
It's not as straightforward as it seems.
I need to generate new UUIDs for all my partitions, and modify my fstab file, and then redo another @world emerge.
When that's done I should have a perfect clobe of my Gentoo install.

So the clone did not work -- far too different hardware.
So I had to go for a new install and it was far more complex than it needed to be. The most recent stage3, the basic building block, had two packages with bugged versions -- GCC and GLIBS.
So everytime I tried installing, it would fail, and both packages are crucial parts of the system.
To bypass this I had to download an older stage3 from early March... About the same time when I did my Macbook Gentoo install. This did the trick.
Both GPUs are detected which is... Interesting.
Now I just need to finish setting up everything I need and this concludes my Master trial.

Obligatory Neofetch of victory

Spoiler:

Congrats I can see the matrix again!

I love this theme. I am actually gonna remake it in red. Just because it will be badass.

And, after an evening of exercises in frustration, I managed to get my Optimus laptop running purely on NVIDIA, completely bypassing the Intel GPU. I'm not gonna go into details, but yeah... nothing in Gentoo is simple

But, it works now. So I am one step closer to my ultimate master trial of Linux From Scratch...

Kudos. Being persistent can be rewarding at times. I guess switching between green and red isn't going to be much of an issue?

I'm gonna have to piss around with Oomox, but no big deal.
After doing pure Gentoo, I can see that the Redcore guys have done a fine job of making an entry-level Gentoo.
Sisyphus is great, plus you can use CLI Portage commands also. What I like less is that Redcore syncs to it's own tree instead of the Gentoo one.
But hey, just minor gripes from a persistent, idiotic prick who actually did Gentoo
It's actually a very rewarding, if tough experience, learning Gentoo. The degree of customization and control you get over your system is second to none.
My install is at 797 packages, which in layman's terms, is a very slim install. No wasted space, no bloat, just what I need.

As for the Mac, I may end up upgrading it to MOS 13 via OpenCore Legacy Patcher. I got more than enough RAM for it though the CPU might hurt...

Yeah, so, Gentoo is starting to piss me off.
Bloody emerge keeps whining about missing USE flags and unsatisfied dependencies for several packages.
And during my last @world, there were 106 packages… all shite that had already been compiled as, you know, THE BLOODY BASE SYSTEM.
Appearantly the LTO USE flag WILL recompile your system with very aggressive performance improving parameters activated but TBH I have not noticed the difference.
The Python upgrade to 3.11 was a pain in the arse.
Cannot install WINE or OBS studio because of unsatisfied dependencies, BUT, those depend on a package I CANNOT BLOODY UPDATE BECAUSE OF BLOODY MISSING BLOODY USE FLAGS THAT ARE BLOODY THERE IN MY BLOODY MAKE.CONF!!!

There is ALWAYS A BLOODY ISSUE. And frankly Gentoo is FAR more work than it should be.

Well bigger that I am delving in the insanity of Linux from Scratch and making my own distro.

I guess that's the next step in your quest. Congrats on leveling up!