nyan
Gentoo’s benefits come from having software specifically compiled for your specific CPU, which can take advantage of its quirks. Technically that’s achievable with other distros as well; it’s just a lot more work when it isn’t built into your package manager. You can also eke out additional performance by building a custom kernel and removing various features that are meant to protect against bugs or security concerns, and while Gentoo doesn’t push custom kernels as hard as it did twenty years ago, the capability is still readily accessible.
So: Gentoo makes it easier to access methods than can in theory be used to speed up any distro. The gains are either quite modest (for custom compilation) or not necessarily that good a tradeoff (disabling Spectre mitigations and other protections in the kernel). 🤷
(Yes, I wrote a serious response to a joke post. Bite me.)
Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS
In addition to everything everyone else has already said, why does this have anything to do with desktop environments at all? Remember, most open-source software comes from one or two individual programmers scratching a personal itch—not all of it is part of your DE, nor should it be. If someone writes an open-source LLM-driven program that does something useful to a significant segment of the Linux community, it will get packaged by at least some distros, accrete various front-ends in different toolkits, and so on.
However, I don’t think that day is coming soon. Most of the things “Apple Intelligence” seems to be intended to fuel are either useless or downright offputting to me, and I doubt I’m the only one—for instance, I don’t talk to my computer unless I’m cussing it out, and I’d rather it not understand that. My guess is that the first desktop-directed offering we see in Linux is going to be an image generator frontend, which I don’t need but can see use cases for even if usage of the generated images is restricted (see below).
Anyway, if this is your particular itch, you can scratch it—by paying someone to write the code for you (or starting a crowdfunding campaign for same), if you don’t know how to do it yourself. If this isn’t worth money or time to you, why should it be to anyone else? Linux isn’t in competition with the proprietary OSs in the way you seem to think.
As for why LLMs are so heavily disliked in the open-source community? There are three reasons:
- The fact that they give inaccurate responses, which can be hilarious, dangerous, or tedious depending on the question asked, but a lot of nontechnical people, including management at companies trying to incorporate “AI” into their products, don’t realize the answers can be dangerously innacurate.
- Disputes over the legality and morality of using scraped data in training sets.
- Disputes over who owns the copyright of LLM-generated code (and other materials, but especiallly code).
Item 1 can theoretically be solved by bigger and better AI models, but 2 and 3 can’t be. They have to be decided by the courts, and at an international level, too. We might even be talking treaty negotiations. I’d be surprised if that takes less than ten years. In the meanwhile, for instance, it’s very, very dangerous for any open-source project to accept a code patch written with the aid of an LLM—depending on the conclusion the courts come to, it might have to be torn out down the line, along with everything built on top of it. The inability to use LLM output for open source or commercial purposes without taking a big legal risk kneecaps the value of the applications. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, the Linux community can’t bribe enough judges to make the problems disappear.
Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt to rpm, you’re probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don’t trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.
(Note that I don’t generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)
Red Hat’s interests often don’t seem to be aligned with those of the average user. The result is that they push for the adoption of software and conventions that make things better for businesses running RHEL, but worse for almost everyone else. This goes back a long way, and makes me question the long-term suitability of any distro Red Hat is involved in for any user who is not paying them for support. It’s the pattern that bothers me, not any single event (and yes, part of that pattern does arise from the fact that they’re a for-profit corporation).
It’s the sort of thing that many people won’t really care about, and if the alternative was Microsoft or even Canonical (which is prone to weird fits of NIH and bad monatization ideas), then fine, I would go with Red Hat. Still, I would recommend a community distro above anything that a corporation has its fingers in.
The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that’s the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.
The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.
“WM8650” seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.
Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you’ve already thought of a specific use for this, I’d dump it back in the junk drawer.
As far as I’m concerned, everything goes under /mnt , and has for the past 18+ years.
Generic distro kernel? You shouldn’t have any problems.
Hand-compiled kernel cooked up with -march=native? You’re sticking with AMD, so there should still be no issues unless some instruction got dropped between the old CPU and the new, which almost never happens. You might have to add a kernel module or two for things built into your mobo, nothing serious.
(Hell, I had a Windows 2000 install on a multi-boot system survive an upgrade like that, once upon a time. Just booted perfectly happily on the new hardware.)