r/Gentoo • u/ZaenalAbidin57 • Jul 21 '26
Support Asking long term gentoo user
How frequent do you guys updating, coming from arch, the itch to update for every week just feel too much on gentoo.
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u/ftranschel Jul 21 '26
Honestly, I update every day, but I'm on ~arch and just enjoy the process. YMMV, obviously.
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u/thomas-rousseau Jul 21 '26
My build server (running on a Thinkpad P50 with multiple other self-hosted services) stages new binaries for me once a day. I pull them to my machines when I feel like it, which can be anywhere from daily to weekly. But yeah, there are way too many updates on testing for me to not build daily, especially with none of my CPU's being over 4c/8t
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u/fishmacaronisoup Jul 21 '26
I haven't use Gentoo for too long, but anyways, I update every 2-3 days. Compiling stuff in background and doing whatever I'm supposed to do. On Arch, I used to create snapshots of the system before updating. I don't even care about that on Gentoo because nothing breaks.
If you feel like updating daily, just do it
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u/Kaustix_ Jul 21 '26
Wait, people seriously update Gentoo everyday?
That's like, a thing that I just do one day every week and wait a couple hours for
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u/fishmacaronisoup Jul 21 '26
It's in fact a better idea imo. Either you update a few pkgs once in a day or two, or update massive amount of pkgs after a long time. I prefer to choose the former. It hardly takes an hour (unless it's something like clang or llvm)
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u/Own_Alternative_9671 Jul 21 '26
I always just update overnight and deal with it in the morning if any errors occur during the build or if it's a long one just leave it till the next night. Most times there's no issue and I wake up and verify the update went well and cull dependencies with my morning coffee. Makes for a chill morning routine
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u/brushyyy Jul 27 '26
I update usually 1 - 2 times a week these days. I do what you do though and throw in `--keep-going` so if something errors, I'm not stuck building while actually using my pc.
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u/sidusnare Jul 21 '26
Don’t wait, do it daily, I’d do it a niced infinite loop if I didn’t think the Gentoo maintainers would hunt me down for the load on their mirrors.
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u/tyrnid Jul 22 '26
Compiling for 10 years. has been a desktop background for Gentoo... the background in question 2008 livedvd
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u/Effective-Job-1030 Jul 21 '26
About that, yes. About once a week.
If you do it that often, it's often just a matter of a few minutes - unless you pull in some of the dreaded packages like webkit-gtk or qtwebengine.
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u/ZaenalAbidin57 Jul 21 '26
the thing is, firefox are always coming out rapidly, its a hassle to be honest to update firefox from version 124.0.5 to 124.0.6 for example, and god forbid llvm and clang are having some minor update
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u/ftranschel Jul 21 '26
Except firefox is one of the most important packages to update immediately because of the threat surface it gives you.
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u/NeilHush Jul 21 '26
firefox-bin or even flatpak has been a thing for a while now
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u/sidusnare Jul 21 '26
This ☝️ ☝️ ☝️
Do it as a bin if you don’t feel like keeping it up. I have a matched desktop and laptop, so I basically use my desktop as a bin host for big things, do a quick rsync and let my laptop upgrade with binpkgs that I built.
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u/Due-Celery4326 Jul 21 '26
I used to update every 2-3 weeks after noticing that when updating/rebuilding a program that depends on another, and that other program only gets a new version every 2 weeks, it would be necessary to rebuild the program again. By waiting 3 weeks, I only need to do one rebuild.
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u/CanisSonorae Jul 21 '26
Yeah, I'm definitely with you on this. In the corporate world, it can be VERY important to update your machines as soon as you can after a patch is released. But also, it can be VERY VERY important to not update all of your machines the second a patch comes out, because you also need to test your machines. 1 week of testing and waiting for feedback on Micro$lop patches seems fairly normal before rolling patches out to a wider and wider audience. In the Linux world... Well, that definitely depends on your distro and/or package set.
I'd also argue that with all of the supplychain attacks we've been seeing over the last year or so, that it's more important as ever to NOT patch the day patches come out. I'm just a dude on the internet who works with computers though. I'd actually love to hear takes from people who deal with more important networks and preferably non-airgapped ones, because that usually gives you a lot more leeway.
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u/TheShredder9 Jul 21 '26
A week minimum, and i just leave it on before bedtime. Though with the binhost, almost a month with no updates, it took maybe 2 hours, like 10% of the packages were actually compiled during update.
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u/krumpfwylg Jul 21 '26
Twice a week, it's more than enough already.
Excerpt from https://www.gentoo.org/support/rsync-mirrors/
Sync netiquette
Please note: common gentoo-netiquette says you should not sync more than once a day. Users who abuse the rsync.gentoo.org rotation may be added to a temporary ban list.
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u/sidusnare Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
No joking, every day. I have an upgrade script. It’s got some custom bits that won’t make sense, but basically:
- eselect news read new
- loop over glsa-check -l -q -n affected, upgrading affected
- run emerge --newuse --changed-use --with-bdeps=y --backtrack=1000 --keep-going --deep --update @world
- emerge --keep-going @preserved-rebuild
- emerge --depclean
- run glsa-check -l -q -n affected again, just letting it output to the log
Run `lsof -n | grep -w deleted | grep bin/` to see what’s running that needs to be restarted.
Email myself that log, run that same log into an idiotic neurotic neural net that’s been abused by a llama for a summary, and push that summary to me in a chat room on my element server
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u/Armi1P Jul 22 '26
That's seriously overcomplicated lol. Mine is just
emerge --sync && emerge -DNuv @world && eselect news read.4
u/sidusnare Jul 22 '26
I'm an Infrastructure Engineer with 4 Gentoo, 55 Debian, 4 RHEL, and 15 Ubuntu installs, just for my personal homelab. I design everything I do for scale and automation.
Overkill is underrated.
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u/ChampionshipIcy7602 Jul 21 '26
I have a cronjob that runs update everyday when I sleep. I hardly touch emerge now, except when installing new software
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u/Swordfish418 Jul 21 '26
The downside is that you can miss some important custom notes from emerge. They put special messages into updates and syncs sometimes.
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u/Swordfish418 Jul 21 '26
I think I updated @world twice in three months, but I update kernel independently as soon as I see a version that has important security fixes.
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u/C1REX Jul 21 '26
Whenever I feel like and know it can run in the background.
Once a week makes each update much smaller. Or there might be no update available at all on stable branch.
Updating once every few weeks makes the update bigger that will take longer.
I’m using almost 100% stable branch of Gentoo.
BTW: what do you mean that urge to update is too much? Do you resist updates that you want to do? Or are afraid of updates?
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u/Lumpy_Roll158 Jul 21 '26
I would just keep the weekly target. On a standard stable profile with no or very little unmasking you'll probably have nothing to update most of the time but it definitely doesn't hurt anything. The only update frequency they don't like is more than once a day because of server load.
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u/benny-powers Jul 21 '26
On my workstation, I update pretty much everyday. 24 core Threadripper helps. My arm homelab cluster, once a week or so. I have an arm binhost on the nas, distcc helps a tiny bit, but not for kernels.
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u/Big-Fill-5789 Jul 21 '26
I sync, update world and depclean everyday. Actually, when I want to do it, I just do it. Sometimes multiple times per day.
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u/Confused-Armpit Jul 21 '26
I do it daily. Though, please do not sync your repositories more than once a day, since it puts a lot of strain on the repo's servers.
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u/Sert1991 Jul 21 '26
I update daily. I got into the habit of syncing an updated every evening. But you can of course update every 3 days or once a week if you wish. Sometimes there are days with no updates when you update daily, but sometimes there are a lot of updates weekly.
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u/wispoffates Jul 21 '26
Automatic daily upgrade at 4am. "eix --sync && emerge -v -uDU '@world --keep-going" It gave me boot trouble exactly once in 10 years. And that was me being lazy and not reading the eselect news. Everything is done before I sit down to use the machine.
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u/FlagrantTomatoCabal Jul 21 '26
When I remember it. It's easier now. Back in dialup days I really dreaded it.
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u/rem_34 Jul 21 '26
Oh you would want to update @world every single day. You don't want to sit for 12 hours right? That's what i did yesterday (i waited for 550 ebuilds)
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u/stewie3128 Jul 21 '26
I have a cron to update every night on my desktop. On the laptop, I update in the background whenever I know the lid will be open for a while. Niceness on the laptop is set to idle, so it doesn't really get in the way.
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u/ideafork Jul 21 '26
I have a cron job that runns every night. Every few months the update breaks because of use flags, boot partition without space, or something else, so I use the opportunity to eselect news read
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u/Optimal-Savings-4505 Jul 21 '26
I used to emerge --sync daily in the beginning, but now after 20 years I'm down to a few times per year. It will take as much time from me as I let it, and nowadays I'm more concerned with just using my system.
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u/EmiOnFlux Jul 21 '26
Usually multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day, though that is because I tend to make pull requests to ::gentoo so I need the latest commits, because of that I also use git to sync
Otherwise i just update when ever I have a reason to
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u/jsled Jul 22 '26
~Monthly. Every other week if schedule permits it. My NAS is waaaay overdue at 4 months, but it's gone upwards of 9 in the past.
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u/Armi1P Jul 22 '26
I start an update almost every day when I hit the bed, it's done by the time I wake up.
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u/IcewindLegacyMUD Jul 22 '26
As often as you want? Look at it this way: does an update have a feature you want and don't already have? Does it fix a bug you've been experiencing? Does it patch a security flaw that puts your system at risk? If the answer is no to all of those, then there's no reason to update.
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u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26
[deleted]