 I have been using Redcore now for almost three months. I'm like a week away from three months, which means I'm like halfway through the challenge. And no, I'm not gonna be talking about Redcore in this video. I'm gonna instead talk about Gen2 in general because there are some things that Redcore does which are directly from Gen2 because it's a Gen2-based distro that just absolutely drive me absolutely nuts. Also, hitting the mic drives me absolutely nuts. So what I wanna do today is talk about the two worst things about Gen2, in my opinion. Now, there are many good things about Gen2 and maybe in a future video, I'll talk about my favorites. But in this video, I wanna talk about the worst things. The first one isn't even really all that bad, but it's messy and I don't like it. And that is overlays. Now, if you don't know what overlays are, think of them as a really weird, poorly organized, not so great version of PPAs in the AUR. It's kind of like a mash between the AUR and PPAs and it's not very well done. Let's just put it that way. And it actually kind of does remind me of Copper in some ways, only I feel Copper is actually better because they build the stuff for you, you don't have to compile it. Also, it's newer, so there's not a lot of crop there. Overlays have been around for ages, so you're gonna see a lot of packages that are really, really old and they're all over the place. And yes, there is like a main package, like site that you can go to. But the worst thing about overlays, at least in my opinion, is that they're hard to understand and hard to use. Now, they have an older way of doing it with layman or something like that, layman or something. And that's not supposed to be used anymore. And now they have E-select repository, which is what you're supposed to use. And I finally did get that to work and I think I understand how I got it to work, but I don't know if I could replicate my success. And that's honestly the biggest problem is that it's not as easy as, say, adding a PPA. It's definitely not as easy as using day you are. And that's not all that, it's just, it's not easy enough. And it's not that big of a deal, simply because you don't come across too many packages where you need it, but sometimes you do. Also, when you're using the E-select repository, if the person who has created the overlay hasn't done a good job of listing out the dependencies for the package that you're trying to install, the package may build, but still won't work because it didn't install all the dependencies. It's not, it's not great, okay? The overlay situation is not fantastic. Also, I should just mention that, again, complete Gentoo Noob here. So I'm still very much learning my way through all of this nonsense. And there's a good chance that I still have no clue what I'm doing when it comes to overlays. Maybe it's really simple and I'm just an idiot. Perfectly possible, in fact, quite likely. So there's that whole thing going on there with the overlays. It's not, again, it's not that big of a deal. That's the reason why I talked about it first because I wanna talk about the big deal here in a minute. But the overlays thing is something that I've encountered probably three times in my three months on Redcore. And it's not fantastic. Let's just put it that way. It's not very user-friendly and there's no real way of telling if there's a package available as an overlay from like Emerge or Sisyphus if you're using Redcore, right? It doesn't say, hey, you can't install this from the regulatory repositories, but it's available as an overlay somewhere. That'd be cool, but it doesn't do that. Also, there's not a built-in way of searching through all of the overlays that are available, like you would get with the AUR, with Paru or EA or whatever. Now, I did very briefly find a way to search through like overlay sources, but not overlay packages, right? So that's a difference because each overlay maintainer or whatever is listed there and you can list those, but as far as I'm aware, you can't list the packages that are inside them. And even then, by the time you get to that point, you've probably already just skipped the terminal tools altogether and gone to the website. So searching and finding overlays is one of the big problems as well. But honestly, that's where this video is gonna be like done because that's all I was gonna talk about today because honestly, Redcore and Gentoo and the combination thereof has been astonishingly stable for the last three months, so much so that I've claimed multiple times on Mastodon and on Discord and on the podcast I think that I'm bored with it, right? And not that that's a bad thing, right? I like stability and stuff like I used Fedora for six months and was perfectly happy being very bored with it, right? But I was expecting a challenge with Redcore and I didn't really get it until today. Now, today I tried to do an update. I do an update every four days on my computer and I figured that's a good, you know, I don't wanna do it every day just because I don't want to. Two days doesn't really seem enough, three days, you know, whatever. Four days for me seems about right. Five days just a little bit too long. So every four days I do an update. Today I tried to do an update with Sisyphus. I always do the update with Sisyphus because that way it catches all the binaries, it catches everything with a merge. It just is the way you're supposed to do it on Redcore so that's the way I've been doing it. And I got a horrendous error where I said something like 36 packages were masked. Now, if you don't know what masking of a package means don't worry, neither do I. I have no clue what it means. I've read what it says it means but it makes no sense to me in terms of an update and I'll talk about that in a minute. So I got this error where it said a whole bunch of packages were masked and I was like, well, maybe Sisyphus is just acting up on me. So I decided to run the emerge command to update the system and ended up getting the exact same problem. Now, part of the problem ended up being that I needed to change a use flag for a package that was required by Ocular, which I don't even use. So I managed to fix that problem because I have been using this for a little while. I know how to create a use flag for a specific application. It wasn't that hard. And that solved a good portion of the problems which is weird seeing as how only one package needed the use flag, but it solved a whole bunch of the unmasked problems. And I'm not sure why, but there was one package that still said it was masked. Now, I went through the process of trying to unmask it. Couldn't do it. It had something to do with a Weyland plasma dependency of some kind. Of course, Weyland is what screws me, but whatever. And I spent over an hour trying to get that thing to be unmasked and I couldn't do it. And I'll talk about the solution here in a minute. But what I want to focus here on is the second part that I think considered the worst part about Gen2. And that is masking of packages. Now, in theory, the reason why a package maintainer would mask a package, basically making it uninstallable, is that they consider it to be a breaking dependency. So that, or a breaking package, rather. Either it's going to break a dependency or it itself will break something else, right? One or the other, they've masked it because they worry that it's going to break something. Now, in theory, this is a good practice because obviously you don't want people to install things that are going to break their system, right? You don't want them to install packages that will cause them issues. And you want them to be fully informed that this may be possible. So they have to actively work around the mask in order to install the package if they want to take the risk onto themselves. In theory, that's good. And if I was just installing something and something came across as masked and I wanted to use it anyways, I could unmask it or whatever and it'd be fine. And that's all on me. But this is the first time since I've been using Redcore that I found in a masked package in an update. Like this is an update. This is a package that has already been installed. It's just updating to a new version and they masked the update. That doesn't float with me. I don't like it at all. It really truly bothers me that they'd even bother pushing an update that they know could break something, right? That doesn't make any sense to me at all because if the purpose of masking is to prevent people from installing something that could be system breaking, then why push something that you know is going to be system breaking? Now, this was a dependency for GTK slash Wayland or something like that. It was really weird. It was not a package that I'd ever actually seen before. And I spent an hour trying to get the damn thing to unmask because I needed to update. Because the thing is like this one package was preventing 127 other updates from going through. So it's not like if it could just stay at the old version. Now, I'm assuming that I could get it to ignore because I know like with Pac-Man you can set it to ignore certain packages. I could do that. But at the end of the day, what I ended up doing thanks to a tip from Josh was just to completely remove Wayland via a use flag so that it could just bypass that package completely. Now, I'm in the process of updating my system right this second. Like right now, and it seems to have worked. Now, whether or not when I reboot, if the system will actually boot, we'll find out. So it's possible that I'm going to fail the six months Linux challenge because if my system won't boot after this, you can be 100% sure that I'm not reinstalling Redcore. Now, I wanna be very clear. The things that I'm talking about in this video here are not Redcore problems. If I was on vanilla Gen2, I'd have the exact same issues with many of the things that it does. Specifically the overlay situation, which isn't easy to use, which is again, not that big of a deal, but also the entire masking thing completely because despite the fact that I said it was a good idea for packages that you're actively installing, it still feels not great, right? There has to be a better way other than saying just, hey, you have to do this, this and this in order to actually install this package because we're worried that it's going to break something. Just give me a confirmation dialogue or something like that in the terminal. Say, hey, this package may break, would you like to install it anyways? That could be, like you don't have, that's the thing that I've noticed about Gen2 is they do things in overly complicated ways that don't really need to be complicated. So the overlays is a good example of this as well. They've just made it overly complicated. It seems to be better than it used to be with layman. I don't know if that's actually true because I never use it, but from the documentation it looks easier nowadays. But it's still overly complicated when other distros have done this better and easier and more user-friendly. Many other distros have community repositories. Arch has one, obviously Fedora has one with Copper. You name it, a lot of distributions have community repositories and they've all done it in a certain way where it actually is fairly user-friendly. The Gen2 way of doing things not so much. And they've done it with this masking thing, right? It's just the idea behind it may be a good one but they've done it in such an overly complicated manner that it's not user-friendly. Now, before the Gen2 bros get into my comments and say, Matt, Gen2 is not supposed to be user-friendly. I understand. I understand that Gen2 is not supposed to be user-friendly. It's supposed to be overly technical. It's for technically minded people. And that's kind of where I'm at right now is that it's just not for me. I'm not, I mean, I do consider myself technically minded but I'm also a moron for half the time of my life, I guess. And a lot of things that I can't, I just can't get my head around it. And there are a couple things in Gen2 that I just can't get my head around. And I've talked about those in this video kind of ad nauseam. So I'm gonna end that here. Now I'm gonna hopefully remember to move this video into my external hard drive so that I don't overwrite it in case the system does crash and I had to reinstall something. So if I do end up failing the six month limits challenge, I will let everybody know. I'll be completely honest about it. I thought about just reinstalling Redcore because that was part of the rules I could reinstall if I had to. I've already had to do it once. I could theoretically do it again and just stick out the next three months but these problems aren't gonna go away, right? It's gonna happen again if it doesn't even happen upon my first update during the reinstall, right? It could very well show me a masked package then and I'd still be just as lost then as I am now, right? Well, so what would be the point? So if my system does not reboot, my challenge is over which would be, it'd be disappointing to get halfway through and have to stop. It would be seriously disappointing. So I guess we'll have to wait and see. Anyways, that's it for this video. If you have thoughts on the hard parts of Gen2, leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you things that you think Gen2 could do better, whatever comment section below. You can follow me on Master's on Odyssey. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash the next cast before I actually wrap this up just real quick. I know that I'm probably not understanding a lot of things that could have solved my problems with both of the things I talked to mothers and things but as I said, I'm a Gen2 noob so just keep that in mind in your comments. So be kind. Anyways, that's it for this video. Patreon.com slash the Linux cast. Thanks everybody who does support me on Patreon. You guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the channel just won't be anywhere near. Where it is right now, so thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly do appreciate it. You guys are all absolutely, absolutely amazing. Thank you for your support. Thanks, thanks, thanks, thanks. That's what I have to say. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time. Always flubbing the ending man. Wells is new.