When Arch meets Source-based

Question

Hello there!
I've been an arch64 user for about half a year now and recently tried out Gentoo (Though I havent been really successful at custom kernels yet...).
Both distros are absolutely awesome, each it's pros and cons. Arch's BSD Style init + PKGBUILDs and simplicity, and Gentoos source-based and *complex*(in a negative way) customizability + USE flags
Are there currently any distros involving Arch's KISS and BSD style init, but with a source-based flavor? That would be my definition of the ultimate distribution.
I'll probably stay with Arch anyway but would still like to know
Thanks in advance! ~Sander
Last edited by Sander Hoksbergen (2009-01-06 21:40:18)

Answer 1

@catwell: AviSynth 3, sadly, is pretty much a dead project. I swear I will help work on it once I am useful in that area But for now, it's 100% unusable. As for USE flags, I disagree. They don't have to be complex (and they actually aren't too much). The problems arise I have found when you start setting USE flags because you _think_ you will use features in the future, or when you try to set all USE flags at the very beginning. Just roll with it, and set them when you need them. Although, more profiles containing average USE flags for different system use cases would not hurt at all.
@jcolinzheng: I agree on the configuration aspect completely. Gentoo should really have a structured, simple config system. Arch has demonstrated that you can do that without sacrificing power, I don't think source-based has to be necessarily too much more complex. As for LFS, it's real nice to learn with and just plain have fun with, but is hard to use as a main distro - mostly taking time to track upstream bugs, security flaws, patches needed, etc... it's ridiculous how much work distros do just for packaging (thanks Arch, btw ).
@alecmg: Agreed. OFFTOPIC{ Try comparing default KDE 4.1 to KDE 4.1 compiled with the 'kdehiddenvisibility' USE flag, and LDFLAGS="-Wl,-O1 -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--hash-style=gnu -Wl,--sort-common -Wl,--as-needed". No, I'm not in ricer mode I've been experimenting with Funtoo long enough to know which flags are and aren't worth setting (e.g. CFLAGS="-O2 -march=native -pipe" is as good as it gets... more just fscks things up almost always). Startup times of KDE and some apps are boosted exponentially, assuming you had a fast PC to begin with. Some packages have problems with --as-needed, and to a lesser extent the dtags one, but they are getting fewer and fewer (and those two are the biggest helps). }
Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-01-07 16:04:11)