I was going to leave a comment about memes but I realized the meme here is that you are actually considering using gentoo.

Watching you write documents in this manner is mesmerizing. How much time did it take you before you noticed that this method was more efficient for you then a wysiwyg editor. In other words, how long do you think it would take an average person to become comfortable with this method of writing? I would love to see a video from you that shows how to learn this method as quickly as possible - tips and tricks.

Void linux is a fantastic distro. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a minimalist system without systemd.

sci-hub is the best ;-)

I've recently switched to Gentoo and I'm loving it. Pretty solid and straight forward. Not good for people that likes to switch DE everyday.

For the record BSD also uses separate package managers for source code and binaries... and ZFS can be installed with your system

Just installed Void Linux in a VM, and I'm already in love with it (as far as it's possible to love a Linux system). Straightforward install, insanely fast boot, straight forward package manager, plain minimalist base system sanely organised and configured. Just waiting on a new hard drive before I install it on a real system.

I honestly think you hit the nail on the head with your previous video. I've tried pretty much every Linux and BSD distro out there over the years including the really obscure ones. You were right when you said it doesn't matter too much. It's all slight variations with the bulk of it being the same. You're just getting slightly different combinations of GNU userland, Linux kernel, and a package manager. I wouldn't worry too much about systemd in particular. The init system's not something most people interact with frequently, particularly on a desktop system. When you start talking about things like Void, you're getting into the realm where you're going to run into problems with distro specific issues and very few people (or no one) will be able to help you out. There's definitely something to be said for sticking with something more popular. When you're leaving the Top 100 on distrowatch you're heading into uncharted territory for the most part. I'd say stick with the top 20-30 if you want to be able to Google solutions to common issues. Parabola's a bit of an exception as it's basically just Arch minus non-free software. Speaking of Gentoo in particular: Compiling the distro yourself is probably not going to net any significant gains and there's a chance you wind up with something less optimal than a pre-compiled package. If you really want to get away from systemd and you only want Free Software, then Trisquel 7 is going to be your best bet. I have an X200 as well and it's great on it.

I have installed Void Linux on one partition, 2 days ago, still i am blindly walking around :-) but no worries, i will dig it , to see what is this :-) In the past, I have used to work on Arch, I have tried Gentoo, but all the big philosophy behind those distros are rubbish in my opinion .... People say they are minimalistic, but after installing all the necessary soft, you have / about the same size as Ubuntu, so where is the minimal distro ? Arch, Gentoo are rolling, but do we need updated software every few days ? Gentoo compile with flags and optimisation, but later on what is the time execution profit ? maybe 0.05 second ? .... next rubbish .... In Gentoo we compile everything, Okay, but after the all compilations the programs time execution is almost the same as in Arch Linux, because Arch binary packages use compilation flags too .... So binary installation in Arch takes 5 seconds only, with all the Gentoo's profits. ..... Today I am on KDE Neon Linux, and on Lite Linux, I like the Peppermint-8 Linux too. They use only about 300 MB RAM after start up, they start from grub menu up in 10 seconds. They are lighting fast, in terminal compilation is so fast, that I can not see the text flying up because that text is like a shadow of hundreds lines in a second, software upgrade to the newest version, and distro upgrade to the new version is by ONE command, bum, bum bum and distro is in new version. In Arch pacman is easy, in Lite Linux is similarly easy manager, even better, because you can remove software with 1 word, but in pacman it was for example -Rnsu , but pacman said : there is no such software .... and now you have to guess, what that software is named for pacman .... funny crossword. Arch installation is very easy, Gentoo is worst through the thousands of parameters, flags, configurations, and additionally kernel to compile selecting thousands of flags, so in the first time it took me 3 days. But OK, we are the geeks, and we love the blood sucking hobby. But Linux Lite to install takes 20 minutes .... that is all, and you can start using your new beautifully looking graphical system, without digging in hundreds of configuration files for a one dot, or # to remove, because a problem. I think most of us are happy to compile, compile, configure, testing, looking for help, testing again, digging in google, etc, etc .... but the reason of using a computer is simple - TO DO THE JOB DONE. Similarly we have television set to watch movies, not to digging inside the box how the transistors are working inside it. That is why I think in this way today. After 10 years with Arch, and 1 year with Gentoo endlessly configuring by hands in hundreds config files, now I do my work with pleasure in beautifully designed Linux distros, where everything works straight from the box. I do not need to be Linux guru digger anymore like a donkey, I am pleased by lovely working distro to do my work done, to browse the internet, to install software by 1 command from a repository of 100 K ready to install programs. I do a computer graphics work, I need maybe 10, 20 programs on my system, and I can say very clearly : I do not need to compile everything again, and again like a stupid maniac :-) .... that is not what we need a computer for !!!! I am on a Linux system, but all the mess with hundreds of distros, each one is differently designed, system files are in different folders, different types of packages, etc .... All that experimentation make Linux weak, on a margin of IT. That is why Windows is winning, because Windows is like a monolith, ONE system, ONE configuration, etc. Millions people are sitting on millions Linux distros digging inside, but for what ? They hate systemd, but why ? they do not know why, but they repeat like monkeys : we hate systemd :-) I have never problem with systemd, never, ever, I was using it and Okay. As i said on beginning in here, I have installed the Void Linux 2 days ago, because i am one of the diggers :-) Years ago it was BeOs system, maybe somebody remember ? With my colleagues we were digging in that system nights after night, happy to find a way to change a font in a config file ..... what a crap .... ha ha ha ..... Similarly is in here with the Void, digging for something, but what is the reason to wasting our time, for what goal ? another distro between hundreds other similar Linuxes ? To prove what ? We need a monolithic, good Linux distro, not hundreds fragmented ideas, discoveries a wheel again and again ........ thanks, and please, this is only my opinion.

When Debian went systemd I decided it was time to go back to Gentoo and see how it had evolved. Running a Gentoo box is much better than it used to be. Learning curve and setup is still there, but in all honesty the other distros had removed me from the underlying stuff too much. Devuan is basically Debian without systemd. I'd love to hear more about Void. The only issue I'm having with Gentoo is I'm having to dive into creating my own ebuilds to have stuff like GitKraken installed through portage. Regardless, it's breathed new life into my system running as lean as it is. I've enjoyed using openRC with Gentoo. I often did custom boot stuff and systemd kept getting in my way. I only feel it's justified when dealing with a large amount of servers in more enterprise environments, not for the average linux home/hobby/programmer user.

Hi, just switched from Antergos (AUR) to Parrot OS 4.1 studio. Immediately felt at home and runs perfectly on MacBook Pro. Looking forward to trying Void and Devuan. Thanks for the tips.

I love Gentoo. But the compile times are killing me.

as far as I'm aware you can still strip systemd out and use a classic init system or an alternative. it just takes more setup

You can install TeX Live packages on Void using tlmgr. The Void package for texlive-bin really just downloads tl-install and runs it with some arguments, so it works as a regular install from CTAN. The big collections from the installer can be found with "tlmgr search \-\-global collection-" and installed with e.g. "sudo tlmgr install collection-latexextra". There seem to be a few people working on different packagings in pull request #5717 in the void-packages repo. github.com/voidlinux/void-packages/pull/5717

If you go gentoo and have other Linux boxes running on your LAN then definitely look into setting up distcc to distribute the complie load and dramatically reduce build times. Something I've never tried but maybe possible to use Windows machines to co-complie to with distcc using cygwin.

you might like this idea for the paragraphs in LaTeX: each sentence on its own line... it took me half a year to get used to it, but now .tex seems simpler, i can move sentences around faster and i like it a lot (and diff, too!)

I myself took a double edged sword after watching this video. I have a laptop and a desktop. On the laptop I had Manjaro KDE and on the desktop I had Arch with KDE on it, but after watching your rising video and Latex videos, I installed Void Linux on my laptop with i3-gaps and I installed i3 on arch and have been gradually making my rice while not using any other de. I like that void doesn't have systemd but getting wifi to work after install for me on Void was harder than the whole install process to Arch imo. Thanks for making these videos and for uploading your configs on github. It is definitely a help.

I've hopped away from Arch a few times myself over the years.... annnnd I always end up eventually coming back. For all the little warts it may have or idiosyncrasies, it seems to strike the right balance of simplicity for me. I like control and doing a lot myself, but not necessarily at the cost of micromanaging every little thing. Gentoo was a bit much work for me. I agree that systemd has some legitimate complaints against it, though TBH it's never given me any trouble so...eh I don't know. If I was to use another distro full time I think I'd use Slackware or Fedora though, though I'd prefer the latter to have a more viable rolling release branch to use.

Void is pretty nice, I've used it for over a year now without any issues. Runit is probably the best init system/service manager I've used, it might not be the first choice if you have a complex web of inter-dependant services, but that's not usually the case on a desktop system. In addition to what you mentioned, Void also uses a few pieces of software from OpenBSD like LibreSSL and splits its repositories into free and non-free if you're looking to avoid the latter.

After experimenting with SUSE, Mandrake and Fedora Core 2 in the early days i tried Gentoo and it was the only system that did immediately what i wanted it to do. Since then i looked never back.

where do you get your wallpapers? or could you upload your folder to wherever so people dont have to compile their own list?

whatever distro you install. please make a video of that.. it will be great to see you in action.

Haven't thought of switching from Arch to any other GNU/Linux distro (Arch is too convenient mmkay), but I've been playing around with OpenBSD (also a mixture of pre-compiled binaries in its main repo and packages that can be compiled from source in the portage tree). It's actually really nice. A lot of software that I already use is in the repos right now, and when I finally get another spare machine for testing, it will be installed on bare metal.

Funtoo user here. It uses OpenRC. Was started and is maintained by Gentoo founder.

Thanks Luke! What are you using for the status bar in this video?

I used to build Gentoo on a Pentium III 550mhz (around 15 years ago), and it's a damning testament to the bloat of software that a Core2 might not have enough horse power. I enjoyed Arch for a while before giving up completely on Linux for many years (and switching to OpenBSD), but I've found Arch to have gone down hill since those days, especially since adopting systemd. I've recently started using Linux again on some of my machines. I'm currently using Mint as a drop in replacement for Windows on the machines where I need to be able to run proprietary things like flash or the nvidia drivers, but I really want to switch to a less cumbersome distribution which doesn't have systemd. I'm quite enthusiastic about Void Linux, but I haven't made the switch yet. Sadly there seems to be almost no videos about it on KZfaq, so it would be fantastic to see a channel such as yours cover it. There are two reasons I don't run OpenBSD on all my machines: - the lack of support for proprietary stuff (I like to game, and watch netflix etc) - At present Firefox does not behave well on the system and runs like crap. I can't recommend OpenBSD for daily desktop uses for those reasons, but I do recommend having a play around with it if you're curious, or want a solid server OS. I've subscribed in the hopes of more videos on Void though!

Devuan as mentioned below which is Debian without systemd ..I do use Arch and Gentoo myself having just bought a rather hefty System76 laptop. I love Arch and everytime I leave it I end up coming back thinking "Why the hell did I do that"

@Luke smith, you can actually install openrc on arch. not sure how good it would work

Can you change also display server? from Xorg to wayland?

I recently switched from Arch Linux to Gentoo Linux. Openrc. Kind of happy with it. Except occasional circular dependencies :)

Maybe you could use Artixlinux since its arch based distro without systemd. You can use runit or openrc.

"Do one thing and do it well." I like that philosophy, considering modularity. I know sysv is ancient but have never had trouble/complaints - yet, so much upstream have switched to systemd. Adoption seems inevitable for production boxes at work, so I'll likely end up making the switch on my personal machines too. Oh well. I don't necessarily oppose systemd, just prefer sysv. So, maybe, unless you oppose systemd or just want to fiddle with something new, then sticking with Arch may be your move. There's no _wrong_ move here - unless that move is Hannah Montana Linux ;)

When you install Gentoo, open any text editor, and write down every single thing you do. Then when you make a mistake, you have auditing to back track just to the point where you did something wrong, or out of order.

Uhh... im a noob... uh... so i installed void got in... setup i3 installed a couple things and... the whole thing froze and uh... i restarted and loaded in and after a few more minutes... it froze again... like... nothing works... cant ... switch to tty nothing.. know how i can figure out why that may be? ... i started on arch... some of what i learned there .. works here but again... im new so know of any logs or something i can like.... yeah idk anyone?

I'm still new to the Unix[-like] field, but I can kind of get behind not using systemd. I even went as far as completely switching to Slackware, but I'm too unintelligent to install software for it (I just switched to Arch; pls halp how do I wi-fi HNNNG). Also, if you need a 64-bit compatible CPU for the X60, there's used Intel T7200s on ebay for literally 0.99USD (as of this post). This video was excellent, man. Stay golden.

I'm pretty much thinking of doing the same, going from Debian to Devuan. The boot time is longer, and GRUB is more spartan, but not much is really that different bar no GNOME or Cinnamon.

what bibliography do you use in your documents?

Luke, please make an advanced video for latex. looks like the PDF is updating live!?! That's really nice :)

i tried alpine on virtual machine and it took 5minutes from terminal to default i3 it has openrc and in takes 65 MB in ram if you uncoment the comunity repo in/etc/apk/repository you can get chromium and flatpak

Este video tem de ser assistido como se fosse um podcast! ;-P Impossível olhar para a tela!

More interesting in this Video is the Document that u are writing in the background as a german I see some german stuff what exactly is it?

Why not try alpine linux?

what desktop and windows manager are you using in the background video?

The main problem with switching is that so many desktop environments as well as applications require systemd. I started using Linux in 1999 and over the years have been off again and on again with respect to my Linux use, mainly because until fairly recently Linux did not have the software tools I needed. When I came back full time I was appalled to discover that it seemed that every distro out there including one (Debian) I was shocked switched over to systemd. They did the same exact thing with the damn Pulse Audio Server, that no one seemed to be able to get it configured correctly until fairly recently and for years caused nothing but issues. The main thing I hate about systemd is I know nothing about how the damn thing works. I really miss easily installing the latest Nvidia drivers by simply typing in init 3 in a terminal window and then to be instantly in a terminal without the xwindows sytem running. Then with a few commands have the new driver compiled and ready for use and then simply typing init 5 and then to be right back in the xwindows desktop with the new GPU driver running. Now it seems that you are at the mercy of the distro devs to have a properly configured driver that is usually several versions behind the newest that Nvidia has available. Perhaps you can still do something similar with systemd but I have not figured out how. I am old school and strongly believe that "IF IT AIN'T BROKEN THEN DON'T FIX IT" This seams to be the case with systemd. How or why so many seemingly intelegent developers allowed systemd to take over is beyond me. It just seems that systemd is a major departure from the basic unix tenants of KISS "Keep it simple stupid". Before systemd came around I never had any issues with my systems just working so there must have already been many small simple utilities that were used that made Linux work correctly. Now there is this big monster named systemd, I think it must be the spawn of Godzilla!

What "DE" are you using here? I really like the "status bar" you have at the top of your screen

The video itself is verrrryyyyy informative

Ok dumb question: what is your "rice" in this context? ("...reproduce my rice..." at 3:27) I haven't heard that euphemism before and Google/Urban Dictionary wasn't particularly helpful. EDIT: Nvm, found an explanation XD

I have been temped by Gentoo but don't think my Linux knowledge level is there yet to do so. I keep hoping on the binary distros so it might but a stop to the hopping from the pain compared to binary distros

I know there is a Debian based systemD-free distro called Devuan. However I've never used it. I only recently heard of it in the process of switching to Debian. I am hoping to stay on this for as long as I can, I'm very happy with it.

Which font is used for TeX editing in the video?

Nice video, like the discussion and you have good arguments! Actually using Gentoo now (with Systemd however) and thus far it has been the best GNU/Linux experience for me. I used Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch (actually more but these were main OS's for considerable time) but I always encountered problems along the line when the system needed to upgrade/big update. Unexplainable errors, Xorg suddenly breaking, etc... Gentoo was a *%$# to set up, especially if you use UEFI and LUKS + LVM. But in the end it just works! Updates are (usually) smooth sailing, you can easily roll back or even install multiple versions of the same package. Compilation does take quite an amount of time though, even on a i7 with 32G of RAM (looking at you guys, Thunderbird, Chromium, Firefox, Libreoffice). So maybe indeed Void is a better contestant, being that one can choose to install binaries. I don't know however if Void can install multiple versions of a package AND Gentoo does offer some packages (like the one's a looked at) as a binaries (e.g. packages.gentoo.org/packages/app-office/libreoffice-bin). P.S. If you are wondering why for the love of Saint IGNUcius I'm running Systemd, at the time of the install I wanted to run Gnome3. I am however contemplating (when i find the time) to try (and perhaps switch) to Sway (wayland i3 port) and Openrc. ;)

I've been using Gentoo since '09. I prefer OpenRC. I even run Gentoo on an eee pc. To upgrade it, I compile the backup image of its root partition on a far more capable machine, also running Gentoo, in a linux32 chroot environment. Distributed compiling also works, although you can run into problems when two different boxes have different versions of gcc or distcc. The initial install can take awhile, and updates after a few months without updating can also take a long time. Gentoo also has slotting, so you can have multiple versions of certain packages installed simultaneously, such as both PHP5 and 7. You can also use systemd if you want. Plus, you are not forced to upgrade unless the ebuild becomes unmaintained in the Portage main tree, but usually major versions of packages are not dropped (e.g. gcc versions 2 through 7 are available in Portage).

I love Runit. I like xbps. I hate when the Arch Wiki doesn't work with Void. That and when *that* package isn't avaliable in the repos, which happens every once in a while. Arch with Runit would be so perfect...

gentoo has binarys also if thats your thing. I prefer source based, and its not as bad as what you may think it is. I have gentoo running on a dedicated server that is a P4 2GB ram and 80GB HD. =P And its a stage 1 install.

what window manager is that?

does void linux have use flags?

Slackware has no Systemd as well. I also believe there is Archlinux with openRC as well.

hah i know this video is 7 years old but once you mentioned void's source and binary options my FreeBSD heart smiled

I use gentoo with openrc, I think it s a great distro, I don t know yet why I shd try void Linux. Though some few apps requires system to be installed, for those I hv a laptop with Ubuntu and fedora in it

Ever heard about GuixSD? It's based on the Guix Package Manager (which is based on Nix) and now, thing escalat quickly: Your whole OS is configured using a single, functional configuration file, written in Scheme. Also: powered by GNU.

Don't see any comments about Devuan. I've never ran it, so I don't know.

Just installed Gentoo on my Desktop, highly recommended. Its a learning experience, but its a really nice system from what I've seen so far. Learning to compile your kernel is a bit daunting at first, but the documentation is great and its really just a matter of tweaking it once you get the initial install (Grub will see at least one old kernel with the default setup). As is the community (I've asked many questions in the irc channels). Oh, and Gentoo can, but doesn't default to being bleeding edge. Its actually very stable by default, and you can "unmask" certain packages as you need, or go full on bleeding edge.

Have you thought about OpenRC? Or any other alternative to systemd available for Arch? There seem to be quite a few. ( wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/init )

Gento looks kinda like lfs mk2. To get more functionality from lfs, you need to dip into blfs. Gento rolls it all together, and it has pkg management. Last time I did lfs was 6.0. Had to go into blfs and it was kinda a pain. I may have to try Gentoo. We'll see.

I've always wondered. The argument that SystemD is monolithic, a single point of failure and is an exploitable vector also applies to the Linux kernel does it not? FYI: I'm just a windows pleb that dabbles in Linux from time to time for fun, and don't really have a horse in the race for what is better. as long as the distro is stable and works for me.

whats your GUI, whats distro, i wont it...

i have been distro hoping for a while now(more than two years ) and although i installed a great arch setup i lost it because of a drive failure.I'm still a beginner though and i still don't get what makes expert geeks hate systemd?it didn't cause me any trouble at all on any distro.Can you please explain what can an init system other than systemd do for a beginner like me?

Hope you tell us your experiences with it! I was tempted to go that route last time I started distro hopping. Pragmatism made me stick with Arch. I was mostly worried about documentation and no Plasma 5. Second one is not the worst, but the first for me is (still) a deal breaker due to not being as proficient as I should with Linux.

I just installed LFS. No desktop or any of that jazz, its just something to tinker with terminal stuff and some C programming with vim and gcc. nothing fancy. was kinda cool.

All distributions are compilation-based. It only differs in who is doing the compiling.

I have Gentoo on a dual core and is not so bad actually. To be fair both seamonkey and libreoffice I installed the binary versions... About optimization, I don't feel there is a big difference with Arch, but I like the flags (there is a command "equery -u" you can use to check what every flag does). I am very happy I went out of systemd, so if that thing is itching it is well worth a try. I also like I can have bleeding edge packages and stable ones (I like checking the latest video drivers and compilers, pe.) Ah, and Gentoo is not really difficult, I think it just got a bad reputation because it doesn't have an installer. It is like any distro, with config files to control everything

Which Desktop do you use?

The text formater what is?

The fact that the systemd developers are arrogant snakes is enough reason for me to explore other options.

If you don't want Systemd, consider giving FreeBSD or OpenBSD a try. They use a classic init system and both have a ports tree.

If you want to keep Arch but without systemd, you can try Obarun (obarun.org). It's a build concept based on Arch but use S6 supervision suite as init and service manager (An awesome init system, very fast and stable like a rock). Also, Obarun exist from three years now and it just incoporated onto the distrowatch database. Give it a try...

To anyone that uses Void Linux in 2021 and future, can anyone tell me the selling point for Void Linux and Gentoo? For example: Arch there is the AUR and pacman is pretty understandable I've been using gentoo for alittle while - literally, only about 1 week but having to edit portage's makecfg before I can install was pretty...tiring, to say the least Are there any way to automate and make installing using emerge a single line process?

Just a suggestion, I think you should upgrade from a core 2 duo.

Gentoo is awesome. For me everything worked fine as long as the packages were in portage. Anything from an overlay tended to break with every update. That is why I switched to arch. Gentoo community is mindblowingly awesome though! You can always get a ton of help.

I've been using Void for like...4 years at this point. It's good, and it works well, but I want to try Gentoo/Funtoo whenever I can build my own PC with a Ryzen CPU. I find myself wanting to build quite a few things from source, and that's the whole premise of Gentoo so why not give it a try? Generally, I would recommend laptop users to stick with Arch/an Arch-based distro (Manjaro is fairly nice with Architect now) or Void, or shit whatever you want. Gentoo is really only useful when you want to diddle around with building and the compilation of software packages, and consequently have a PC with a good CPU. Sidenote: If you're looking at Void and want to use Wine for games, just install Lutris and use the wine build it comes with.

I like that LaTeX on background it's beautiful as I am student in Slovakia I hope that I will be able to write Documentation in something else than Microsoft Word. But hey I am in slovakia. :D

Void Linux is amazing. Rolling release (forget reinstalling), no systemd (forget crap init problems), offers Mate, Gnome, KDE, Xfce, whatever, rapidly growing number of available packages, great support, great speed, great stability, great looks... You name it!

What desktop environment is this?

He finally made the switch!!!

What is your opinion on FreeBSD?

have you heard of stali from suckless?

was running gentoo since I was 15 (arch void) too Bedrock linux seeems interisting

omg I had exact the same idea just before I clicked on this video

You might also want take a look at T2 SDE which is basically a Meta Distribution.

I am a big fan of Arch myself, I hate Systemd specifically for not following the Unix philosophy. I tried Void Linux in the past, I was thinking that I'd end up with Gentoo, but this didn't happen for one reason. Gentoo, for my taste, is overengineered, while Arch tries to keep things simple. I also feel more comfortable with Arch. Recently I had all my hard drives fail and I tried Alpine Linux and used for 3-4 months. It's awesome, but not for everyday use yet. You should try it, enable edge repository for rolling distro.

Ah its LaTeX, cause was wondering what i saw for a few seconds. :D

Arch Openrc is viable and working, Manjaro or even ArchBang. Void is ok but more based on Alpine (despite what they might tell you). I have tried to switch from Arch but always return.... anyway VM other systems see how you go...

gentoo is only pain at beginning. once you've got it rolling, ongoing maintenance is fairly trivial and easy. and i have not seen a more flexible distro yet.

How is this guy making LaTeX .pdf documents on Linux?

Using Gentoo with openrc, KDE Plasma desktop, super fast and snappy. I installed it as an experiment but its here to stay

Hyperbola (Similar to parabola) uses openrc

Void Linux is SUPER fast with Runit!

Parabola has an openrc edition

He is now using artix

stop having a tism attack