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- Hacker News
- I always wondered how long it would last tbh.
I've always used source-based packages, but chromium was the one I simply dropped in favour of Firefox.
On a 16c32t / 64G machine, compiling Firefox takes ~1h with LTO and PGO, while Chromium already took 5+h in 2019 without PGO. Then they removed jumbo-build because there were some issues and kept adding code and toolchain deps (jumbo-build is a build step that merges a few hundred source files before compiling to do the header processing once, shrinking the build from 5h+ to ~1-2h). Last time I checked the build had 70k+ build steps, with the final link step easily taking 10m+ with LLD. Answering some other comments: ccache doesn't help, because every version will have some minor header changes somewhere, so basically the entire cache gets invalidated even within the same major (e.g. 151.44.22.11 to 151.44.23.28).
by plqbfbv - Currently exploring a return to Gentoo here, for "reasons". My solution for a while (even before Gentoo) has been <https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium-por...>
It builds Chromium in a Docker container using Debian and spits out an AppImage. The AppImage seems to run fine on Gentoo, so I've been using that.
Note that for some time, I've had to patch their build process (it fails to pull a GIT repo in my environment -- so I have to shell into the container and run the pull manually). I've considered making this the basis for a Gentoo package... but I'll likely stick with my current process (or just use ungoogled-chromium's binaries).
by codebooks - The irony being that ChromeOS is actually Gentoo under the hoodby Almondsetat
- This is what we get when we go all in on a monolithic bloated platform, and then let its direction be primarily determined by one company. We'd be better off with a simpler, albeit less featureful, platform, or at least one that's more modular.by BrenBarn
- Very related and interesting discussion that got posted in the comments about the new Crubit thingie: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/embedder-dev/c/W_...
- > Measures need to be taken by somebody qualified that this doesn't keep happening in packages as important as these.
To the single guy maintaining it, and no offer of help. Crazy entitlement.
by Thev00d00 - I tried Gentoo some 20 years ago or so for fun at home. I guess my naive thinking was that software specifically compiled for my hardware would run noticeably faster and "better".
But I didn't last for very long. I remember starting the install for a bigger app before going to bed, only to find the thing still building when I woke up. And as for the dream of more tailored builds, I never really noticed anything much different - I probably was too uneducated about build configurations, or - more likely - the differences just didn't matter too much.
Eventually, I switched to Ubuntu and never looked back.
So, I'm curious - is anyone using Gentoo as their daily driver, and what is the main incentive for you?
by kleiba2 - Until a few years back most of my systems used Linux From Scratch. It's amazing for learning your system and how all its libraries integrate. I created my own boot scripts, my own pacman package manager repository, etc. One of the main reasons I stopped using LFS was the amount of work required for updates.
Firefox is bad to compile yourself, because it's slow and often requires a library version you don't have, such as a new ICU version. Updating ICU also requires you to build packages that depend on it: harfbuzz, ffmpeg, qt5, poppler and the list goes on.
Chromium takes it to a whole new level. While Linux packages typically have an automake flow (configure, make, make install) Chromium requires ninja, not just ninja but a specific version depending on the Chromium version. Then you need a ton of libraries with specific versions (or custom patches) or use the built-in versions provided by chromium, which may or may not compile at all. Then there is clang, while most software is compiler agnostic, Chromium does not compile with gcc. Of course, it needs a specific clang release, sometimes even a pre-release, or again a load of patches to compile. It seems the chromium build process is mostly built by engineers desperate to reinvent the wheel. While everything can work fine with sane Linux defaults (GCC, automake, system libraries) they convinced themselves their software is so complex and unique it requires a special treatment.
by williebeek