> ArchLinux satisfies that requirement pretty well but my main issue with it is pacman. If you don't religiously run upgrades every hour on the thing it will just break because for some reason key management is not figured out yet there. The installation is also quite big usually due to packages not being split.

This is a weird take. I run pacman -Suy every month or so unless I need to update something specific and never had any problems. Sometimes I did have to run `pacman -Su archlinux-keyring` first to get new keys and everything just worked. So I don't know what the author means by "key management is not figured out yet"

> Sometimes I did have to run `pacman -Su archlinux-keyring` first to get new keys

That's probably what he meant. He may not have been aware of this command but why should he? This is not something any other distro seems to require.

Seems that this indeed changed since I last even had to use that command and archlinux should just do this automatically now: https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/archlinux-keyring/-/c...

I had to deal with this the day before yesterday. It is indeed still annoying. The issue might have been because I hadn't turned on the machine in a couple months. Can't run a chronjob if you aren't plugged in.

It doesn’t.

Had to manually refresh keys a couple months ago.

It’s a yearly ritual to appease the arch penguin.

Seems hugged to me

https://web.archive.org/web/20241208111330/https://blog.brix...

The article is basically building a poor man Gentoo with worse tooling.

My main take away from it is that Gentoo has apparently lost so much mindshare, people don't remember it even exists or know what it does.

I'm very much aware of Gentoo...but if you're going to compare basically any distribution is "poor man's Gentoo" because it's a collection of packages built from source files.

The main advantage of Gentoo is not building from source. One could argue that's the main disadvantage of Gentoo.

An ordinary Linux can be configured by installing pre-compiled packages. The system either has the package or not. Gentoo allows the package itself to be configured. Think of package ./configure arguments; they're abstracted as "USE flags" in Gentoo and allow tweaking the package internal configuration. It also allows modifying the environment variables used during the build. Setting CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS allows optimizing for the system's CPU instead of doing a generic x86-64 build.

You are rebuilding Alpine packages on top of LFS while using glibc. So I guess you want a minimal system with OpenRC.

Gentoo will give you that with proper package management including on the system part without having to do the weird dance you are making with abuild with a nicer experience if you want to patch and update your packages later and significantly better tracking on what you have done.

I have a hard time seeing anything starting from LFS which wouldn’t be better actually starting from Gentoo.

I also have the “Alpine, but with glibc instead of musl” itch. Have to wonder how common this itch is…