The web of dependencies for both build and execution can be maddening. This is why apt-get and yum have won: they take care of finding and downloading those 3246536245 libraries which are absolutely essential for each stupid two-liner application out there. And when it comes to large software (which you probably don't manage on a chromebook), good luck downloading and compiling several GBs of KDE or GNOME source code with the right options for your hardware.

running/building a full plasma 5.5 KDE 5.x current. Full install including most office apps (Libreoffice, etc), a bunch of emulators/games (free and proprietary - steam included), and other apps.

Intel haswell/sandy bridge chromebooks with custom hard drives. I think you're greatly overestimating how difficult it is to maintain all of this on Portage. I invite you to try a distribution that isn't Debian or Redhat-based. You might never go back.

A comment like this is even better if you mention what distro you were using and maybe drop a link to a guide showing how easy Portage is to use. Then, people might experience what you describe.

I already mentioned in the great-grandparent that I was doing this with Gentoo and Calculate linux (which are interchangeable).

I try not to specifically invite people to "install gentoo" thanks to /g/. they'll find it on their own. There's a lot of learning before quickpkg makes an install take 3-5 minutes.

Gotcha. But thanks to /g/? Didn't know that existed so how would I have found it on my own? And "lots of learning" despite you having way less headaches? I'm a little confused as some of your answers inspire more questions.

/g/, the technology troll board of 4chan, has a meme of "install gentoo" whenever someone says "which is the best distribution to install for a new user?" Those users usually come back about a week later hating everyone for putting them with such a difficult OS. Calculate Linux has effectively removed most of this barrier, though, making Gentoo really easy to maintain for newbies.

The Gentoo Handbook is an amazing tool to learn linux. By the end, you have an expert's understanding of how Linux works, and how to install it without a GUI (or even a package manager). I learned it during the "Stage 1 era", when the install started with bootstrapping, then building your compiler before installing the rest of your system. Nowadays, you partition disks, format, chroot in, set timezone and encoding, untar the stage 3 tarball, emerge --sync, build your kernel (which is the hardest part), install a bootloader, install wpa_supplicant, and you're done. It's about 30% more difficult than an Arch install, becuase you probably will screw up your first kernel configuration and make a nonbooting kernel, booting to a black screen. But unlike Other OS's and distros, when it breaks in Gentoo, it's probably your fault.

I have way less headaches, because chromebooks are braindead to deploy this way. flash a bios, and then install the binaries once booted off a LiveUSB. Quickpkg allows you to make binaries of your existing system (built for Sandy Bridge, until I decommission the C710's, then I'll build for haswell) with all your custom flags already set, so VLC and other apps are far more robust than their Ubuntu/Redhat versions. Gentoo is also the only distro other than GalliumOS that actually has working Elan touchpads for many chromebooks (thanks to Hugh Greenburg of GalliumOS's patches that I'm maintaining for newer kernels), as the patches have not been included in Arch or other distributions's kernels.

I run a Poettering-free install (JACK instead of PA, wpa_gui instead of NetworkManager, OpenRC instead of systemd), so having one master install I can re-deploy in the amount of time it takes to brew coffee is pretty handy, especially considering de-poetterizing a new Debian/RHEL/Fedora/Arch install is painful, if not nigh-impossible, and at the very least time-consuming.

re /g/

Haha. That is pretty evil given my experiences starting with command line Linux back in the day. Far as learning, I've heard that before about Gentoo. Thought about doing it at some point. Right now, kind of mixed between learning BSD or Linux as the security enhancements I create might need to temporarily stay proprietary to support their development. BSD vs GPL you know. I mean, I'd give back bug-fixes or feature developments where possible but differentiator has to be secretish.

"But unlike Other OS's and distros, when it breaks in Gentoo, it's probably your fault."

I'm avoiding that right now but fine with the concept. Reminds me of Mentor's Hacker Manifesto we used to quote to justify such responsibility.

"so having one master install I can re-deploy in the amount of time it takes to brew coffee is pretty handy"

That is handy. I've always especially liked how the source-based distros were customized to one's own hardware. That drastically increases the initial deployment time but significantly reduces many issues along the way.

there are two solutions for reducing deployment/build time. First is to use distcc on all machines (so when idle, they contribute to the building of any packages). Second solution is to build one master image, quickpkg it, and then deploy the binaries. I use a combination of both; all binaries are compiled for sandy bay architechture, so I get most of the benefits (though haswell/broadwell gets faster VLC/ffmpeg if I recompile), and they build at night when nobody's around.

Why hasn't Gentoo made the same changes Calculate Linux has?

Because it would pigeonhole the distro.

Calculate basically takes Gentoo and precompiles it with certain defaults.

This means that the Calculate maintainers have made certain choices for the user, while Gentoo proper would have left them up to the user.

Why would "building from source" be a difficult way to create a package? ISTM that if you have any software at all, it's already building from source? I understand that building from source is considered difficult for users, but here you seem to be talking about maintainers. Or do you mean setting up $#%&ing autotools? In that case I agree.

the dependency hell from building from source is slightly less of a purgatory than that coming from anything above it. That includes the headaches of autotools.

I dunno, Gobolinux is pretty much LFS with addition layer of tools. And more often than not, the problem is that of developers doing a crap job of actually documenting their dependencies (or hardcoding paths and/or filenames).

Perhaps it's slightly subjective, since I would place FreeBSD ports in between rpm and deb in terms of difficulty.