I’ve mostly switched from Arch to Gentoo. I still have Arch installed on one of my two NVME drives. I mount that drive & symlink my data directories to my Gentoo user’s home.
Why? Curiosity. I think the finer control over my system is neat, but a little overwhelming right now.
As convenient as I found systemd, I must acknowledge the scope creep. It’s made
by a corporation, for corporations. I wanted to try a distro that didn’t use
it. On the second day I toyed with the PACKAGE_ACCEPT variable too much. Allowed
all testing ebuilds, then reverted my changes after emerging @world… pretty
sure that install was ruined as every command was followed by a readline
error. I persisted, reinstalled, and have since been individually allowing test
ebuilds. So far no problems other than Anki’s ebuild not compiling (for the
same reason it wouldn’t compile from the AUR on the Arch-side)
My environment is mostly the same as it was on Arch. Using the same programs here as I did there.
I’ve been distrohopping admittedly, I dabbled in Artix with s6 and dinit.
s6 was fast, dinit was much simpler but not as fast (still faster than
systemd). I liked that as a user you could run dinit in your login shell and
it’d launch “user services” configured in ~/.config/dinit.d/. Didn’t tinker
around as much with s6 as it seemed unecessarily complicated in comparison.
I moved the Gentoo drive from my desktop to my laptop. I then set up a Gentoo chroot environment on my desktop so I could compile packages on my desktop and enable it as a binhost for my laptop. I still need to figure out how to synchronize my use flags between my desktop’s build environment and laptop…
Setting portage up to make binary packages was as simple as adding
FEATURES='makebinpkg' to /etc/portage/make.conf in the build environment on
my desktop.
On my laptop I commented out the default gentoobinhost entry in
/etc/portage/binhost.conf/gentoobinhost and made a new file for my desktop,
where rather than using https as the transfer protocol, I opted for ssh.
[navibinhost]
priority=1
sync-uri=ssh://jstn@navi.local/var/chroot/buildenv/var/cache/binpkgs