 So yesterday I announced the six-month Linux challenge and basically the idea behind this is to Choose a distribution that you're not currently on and use it for six months now Obviously, this is more of a challenge if you choose a distribution that you've never used before and that's what I've ended up doing now yesterday, I asked people to choose between two different distros Redcore Linux, which is based on gentoo and Micro us which is based on open Suza one was an immutable distro, which is the micro s and the other one is well It's basically gentoo so obviously Redcore one I had really no doubts But it was actually closer than what I thought it was when I counted this morning the tally was fifty six to forty three in Redcore's favor. There were a lot of people who wanted to see micro s so if you were one of those people and Obviously your choice didn't win fret not eventually micro s will show up on this channel I'll do a two-day spend in it or something like that and we'll see how it goes But that'll be later on right now. I'm focused on Redcore which I have installed so you guys can actually see my Redcore install Right here. You can see my fancy Neofetch right there says Redcore Linux hardened rolling x86 64 right there for you all to see and I have to say First of all the installation was very very easy. It just used it just uses calamaris If you've ever used a calamaris installer, you've used them all and this was no different It worked really well when I installed Redcore my look on my laptop Calamaris did crash Right towards the end of the installation Just restarting it and doing it over again fix the problem when I installed that on my main machine Which is what you're looking at right now. I had no issues whatsoever So the installation was both easy and very quick so if you are interested in using gen 2 but are scared of the installation Redcore may be the solution for you and We'll talk a little bit more about my thoughts on that here in a minute, but first let me talk about how the setup goes So basically once you've installed it you're presented with a standard or fairly standard Plasma desktop now. I have been in the middle of an Xfce challenge for the last three and a half four weeks or so and that's being kind of put on pause right now because I am in plasma and Installing a GTK based desktop environment on top of this would be a kind of a pain in the rear end So right now I'm using plasma but the point is is that when you're when you boot into Redcore for the first time you're presented with a plasma desktop and it's fairly minimal in terms of stuff that's installed and It just looks and feels just like plasma Honestly, you wouldn't know you were using gen 2 until you started to use the package manager now package management is where Redcore is weird. Okay. It's just a little weird So it does come with a merge just like you'd expect because this is gen 2 and it can be used exactly like a merge can in Regular vanilla gen 2 so you can do something like do do do as do as emerge and then this is one that I used earlier because the Standard package manager wouldn't work. So I wanted to install x-clip. That's how you would install something using emerge in gen 2 It's very very simple. It does take a little bit of a time sometimes depending on what you're actually Installing because it's going to compile it but if you are familiar with gen 2 and you know how to use emerge in Portage and everything like that you can use that in Redcore just as you always would it is not how However, the package manager that they suggest that you use by default the one that they want you to use is called Sisyphus so it's s s i s y p h u s now I Am a history major and I knew I knew that name from somewhere now Sisyphus was the guy punished by Zeus to roll the the boulder up the hill over and over again for eternity and You know, it's a very weird package manager name. I'm just gonna put that out there for two reasons first of all The idea behind the whole Sisyphus legend is that it's kind of a difficult task to push a boulder up a mountain, right? Obviously, there's more to it than just that but it's a it's a weird thing to call your package manager when that's supposed to be So difficult right also if you're dyslexic like I am you guys noticed I always mistype things all the time That's a symptom of my dyslexia and you know fat fingers, but Sisyphus is really hard for me to type I mistype that thing all the time and I've since created an alias, which is you know going to save me forever But it is very hard to type for me. So just it's it's not my favorite Let me just put it that way anyways The point of Sisyphus is that it's supposed to present you the ability to install things from the gentoo Repositories with a more apt like syntax So you could do something like this you do your do as or pseudo whichever you want to use either one of those by the way Are installed by defaults you have to install one of them in order to you to give your your user access to root I could get I could not get pseudo to install So I ended up with do as it's fine So you getting you use you access route then your Sisyphus then install and then the name of the package You could also do something similar to this With uninstall now it's a little bit different I don't know why they chose uninstall instead of remove because if they're trying to go with quote-unquote apt like Remove would have been the word there to use because that's what apt uses but uninstall works the same thing it just un-emerges everything and Basically, that's what Sisyphus is. It's a front-end for emerge. That's really all it does and Obviously it presents some problems. So first of all it's always going to prefer looking for binary packages and That's not a problem. It's probably a good way to go but if you've ever used gentoo before you know that not everything in the gentoo repositories is offered as a binary and That means that every once in a while you're gonna come across something that is not a binary that you're gonna want to install with Sisyphus and It's just not going to work now There is a flag that you can use dash dash e-build like so if you can spell And that will actually compile The package that you're trying to install even if there is a binary you can use e-build to compile it if you want to But if you could get into a spot where Sisyphus will not install the binary because it doesn't exist using dash dash e-build will actually install it in most cases There have been a couple situations where Sisyphus just would not install anything completely and that has to do with git I could not get git to install with Sisyphus. I had to use emerge and the same thing with x-clip I had to use merge to install x-clip why that is i'm not sure So Sisyphus for me has been very Okay, it's it's kind of a package manager. I don't like the name at all and it does hunt for binaries And I you I would prefer to use as many binaries as possible just to save time I don't want to compile everything So it's been like I said it's been hit or miss. I don't mind using emerge So I'm glad that that's a backup that I can use and probably over time What you're probably meant to do is use emerge more and more And learn more about emerge and portage and stuff like that and leave sisyphus behind So that's part of the package management story The other part of it is the regular gen 2 stuff now when I say regular gen 2 stuff What I really mean is stuff having to do with portage now Portage is the package manager for gen 2, right? It goes in concert with emerge and I'm not explaining this right because I'm not a gen 2 guy So all the you gen 2 guys out there. I apologize for being an idiot But just let's move on the point is is that if you're going to do anything That is gen 2 like with red core, you're going to deal with this directory here The big one is going to be the use tag. So if we go into this directory here and do an ls You'll see all of these Little files and most of these and probably all of them actually are Just one line per file and what these do is set use tags or use flags. I should say Use flags for every single Application that has been downloaded with either sisyphus or emerge now. Obviously the ones for sisyphus Are ones that it's done automatically. So like anything that has the package name actually or the location of the Application and where it's downloading it from the repository like app or dev or whatever Those ones are the ones that have been automatically created by sisyphus the ones that are like the The duas one and the mpv one those are ones that I've created and it doesn't really matter what you call these packages Because you're it's actually just going to read it from the the file But the point is is that you create your use flags here And this is the second part of the whole gen 2 Thing this is use flags really are the reason why you'd want to use gen 2 They're very very very powerful We're also mightily confusing if you've never used them before I have used them before and i'm still mightily confused about 75 to 85 percent of the times. So The basic idea is that the use flags tell emerge in portage what to Compile the application with so certain features can be put into the applications or left out of the application So for example, let's just say you wanted to compile audacity And you wanted to give it support for pipe wire, but not pulse audio or vice versa You could do that with use flags by adding the pulse audio flag and then minus pipe wire or whatever And it would then ensure that whatever one had minus in front of it would not That feature would not be built in but the other one would be that's very very not Well explained, but let's just go ahead and go into This one here and you can kind of see what a use flag looks like first it lists the package So the first part of this is the repository that it's being downloaded from or the category that it's being downloaded from I should say then the name of the package and then it just lists all of the Use flags that you want to be built into the application as you compile it Now probably about 50% of these I don't actually need I just listed them all because I didn't know any better And a lot of times that's pretty dangerous to do It does try to tell you which ones that you need to use so Pay attention to the gentoo wiki and all of the packages that it tells you to install and how to install them So do a better job than I did But the point is is that all of these features would then be built into mpv when it was compiled And if I wanted to have one that was not compiled into it And I want to make sure that it was never compiled into it I would just add a minus in front of it and then that would ensure That say jack was never going to be compiled into The package now that's a very Pedestrian amateur way of explaining use tags or use flag that can't even call them the right thing So seriously Talking is is not my forte That's like I said, that's a very amateur way of explaining use flags I'm sure that there's a more technical and correct way of explaining them So I apologize for not doing a very good job, but hopefully you get kind of the idea But use flags are The most Important thing about gentoo at least I think so and because that's true It's also the most important thing about red core because red core at its heart is gentoo and that's where I kind of want to Leave off because there's not much more for me to say in terms of what this is because it is gentoo It uses the non-stable branch of gentoo once you have it installed it acts and behaves like gentoo outside of The sisyphus thing and you could ignore that Completely if you wanted to you'd never have to use that the red core package manager If you don't want to you could just use emerge all you want And it would just perform and react exactly like gentoo where red core differs Is with installation so That's where I have a bone to pick with red core because Well, I'm not really a bone to pick but mostly just a a statement Red core is not gentoo Okay, despite everything that I just said about it behaving Exactly like gentoo once you get it installed It's not gentoo because the point of gentoo the Thing that you do with gentoo is install it, right? That's the challenge of gentoo the actual usage of gentoo has never been the most difficult thing once you have it installed you've reached and overcome the mountain of difficulty That is gentoo you bypass all that with red core. You use a calamari's installer It's meant to be a very easy to install version of gentoo and it succeeds in that so far It has been exceptionally stable now granted It's only been a day so I can't tell you that it's always going to be stable But I had 917 or 971 or 72 or something like that updates when I first installed it it installed all of them I did a reboot it rebooted fine Usually you are going to be able to tell if your distribution is going to fail right after install If that initial update fails or causes problems In my case it didn't it worked just fine So it has been very stable over the course of the first day. So kudos to that And it's just been a very interesting learning experience because the Really all you have to learn about gentoo if you're going to use red core is the package manager So if you can learn about emerge And portage and then be happy with the places where you have to kind of insert sycophants to Make up for your lack of knowledge those three things would get you through right But that is only part of the gentoo experience the biggest part of the gentoo experience is installation And you bypass all that with red core now. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that it's great I think it's if you've been in the linux community for a while You'll remember the fervor of arch based distros right when arch was really truly considered hard to install We just had a explosion of arch based distros that all claimed to be the easy way to install arch We you know, we had manjaro and arco endeavor and Antrigos and things like this right you had all these distributions that claim to be arched linux But just easier to install than arch ever was right That's basically what red core is and there's nothing wrong with that You know scenario it works just fine And i'm going to have a good time using it over the next six months But if you are here To learn about gentoo, you're only going to get half the story You're not going to get the installation part of it. And if that doesn't bother you, that's fine If that's not what you're here for you know, whatever But if you are if you're going to think that you're going to miss out I would say try gentoo first and Experience the failure that is your first attempt at installing gentoo and then maybe move on to red core So my initial impressions of red core so far Are that is that it's really good actually the only Really bad thing that I would say out of the box about red core is that it doesn't include sudo or dues And it really should if you're going to be easy to use version of gentoo It should at least include a way to get to root or at least allow your user to get to root And it doesn't so you have to know What to do in order to get that and that means you have to go into the root You know I have to sign into the root account Install dues or install sudo and then you can move on but if you don't know to do that It can be very confusing So that's probably the only thing that I'd say is like the negative part about about this Everything else has been very very good so far I've only encountered one thing that I haven't been able to get installed and that was sudo And that's because you have to unmask certain packages And if you're confused as to what that means, don't worry. I'm confused too I don't have any clue why they continue why they mask things. I'm sure there's a technological and very Sound reasoning behind why they do so. I just don't know what that is And I don't know how to fix it even though I went to the gentoo wiki It explained how to fix it. I still don't get it And I don't know Something something else to learn. So those are my initial thoughts on red core. This is day one I'll be going into august now. First of all Don't worry about me making constant red core videos You won't have to worry about another red core video for quite a while probably a month in Maybe I'll do it a month and then I'll do maybe midway or something like that We'll make three or four videos over the course of the next six months nothing every single day I'm not going to spam the channel with red core videos. So don't worry about that If there are things about red core that you want to know, let me know in the comment section below I'd love to hear from you. You can follow me on mastodon or odyssey those links will be in the video description You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the linux cast Thanks to everybody who does support me on patreon on youtube because we're all absolutely amazing We got two of the channels that's not be anywhere near where it is right now So thank you so very very much for your support And I don't know why I was talking so very fast there. I don't know why it's okay. I um I seem to get to this point of the video and just forget what I'm gonna say all the time So thanks everybody for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time