Snapdragon (Qualcomm)

Focuses on mainstream such as high power efficiency and high powered graphics processors for gaming and virtual reality. Frequently build in house chips since Arm holdings often has many issues.

Commonly known for various overheating issues.

Exynos

Main goal seems to be to one-up Qualcomm. Basically throws a few optimizations on top and trades the Adreno GPU for a Mali one and calls it a day.

Mediatek

Hilariously overpowered CPU setups, (eg. 12 core maximum frequency, high end arm chips)

And for whatever reason pairs it with the weakest p.o.s. gpu possible getting 0 efficiency and 0 performance. lol

Mobile Graphics Processing Chips

Adreno

Purchased by Qualcomm from AMD, extremely high performant, even more so than Nvidia’s Tegra line up but arguably only relevant when pushing 4k resolution (which is extremely rare)

Mali

Is alright, kind of budget range, stripped down. Not bad performance but definitely sub-par. Arguably fulfilling for 1080p resolutions, maybe even 2k but some say it stutters at that point.

A dark past

First big issue: drivers. The default graphics driver is MUCH better, before it was rendering at like sub-vga resolution, now it atleast has the res right. And it renders decently. Not native drivers decent but usable. Oh and they didn’t kill my wifi drivers this time. That’s a huge step forward. Although unfortunately the internet to my home went out the moment windows 10 finished installing. Why am I not surprised. So on the plus side those are the only two essential ones, but on the down side those are literally the only two I had. The keyboard function controls didn’t work. The mouse was unusable, but oddly enough an external mouse was fine. Oh and I still haven’t figured out how to fix my internal microphone, even after being driven up to McDonald’s to bum off of their free wifi. No worries, I ordered food. I didn’t eat it, but I still ordered it.

(insert: yesterday I got an email from microsoft to come back to their insider/developer program, I might actually consider it. I recently tested an hp laptop too. And when I test things I’m not lazy about it, I’ll hundreds of bug reports and suggestions per product that no one else notices)

Cortana

Anyways Cortana used to be amazing. Cortana used to make the whole win10 experience worth it no matter what goes wrong. Now she is absolute –

Let’s be a little more objective here. She doesn’t understand me. She doesn’t search my programs, only the internet until a delay that feels like forever, and for some reason disk usage feels terrible now, no idea what that’s about.

Window Manager

The new window manager is nice… when it works. It quite often goes to a solid black taskbar and solid white window frames, rather than the pretty transparent colored alternatives. And it even removed my background once, which was fun trying to figure out where they moved the themes to. The settings really aren’t that bad, nothing like the changes around the Vista era.

Oh back to the internet problem – I used to have a separate modem and router, and after the outage, they gave me a new two-in-one modem-router combination unit. It quite often drops DSL connection and windows 10 decides to disconnect, which sort of makes sense, but is very annoying since I have a lot of servers on my home network set up that I’d like to be able to use. A local minecraft server, media streaming station, dev server, remote drive, etc. Like please stop doing that, Windows. It also seems to handle RAM very strangely. It’s either not using hardly any or swapping like mad using too much. Windows 7 definitely didn’t do anything like that. The machine has 8GB of RAM so, it’s not like theirs some sort of shortage going on…

I don’t know about mobile devices, but my Sony Xperia Z3+ is gorgeous but it’s 810 and 3GB of RAM is struggling… morbidly. It’s constantly capping out both central processor unit capabilities and random access memory capacity. I like to have several social media apps going at once (kik, skype, snapchat, and facebook) and that simply doesn’t work. Snapchat simply doesn’t even work anymore and kik lags pretty decent but it’s the only one left usable. Skype is ridiculous unless I’m doing nothing but staring at in foreground because it likes to hog the scene. Facebook is extremely wonky in ram-capped situations and looking at my phone’s process manage its ram is to the ceiling. I am thoroughly convinced more beef would help my problem. Until now I’ll continue resetting my phone every so often and force killing apps. Oh well Oh if it’s worth anything I found 12GB on my laptop is enough. eight gigabytes most definitely isn’t though. I feel like that much is a bit much to ask for a phone? maybe it’s necessary. Guess only time will tell.

So there’s this old joke on the interweb called where linux users would tell newbies to install install /g/entoo but little did I, or the rest of the world know, that it’s infact not a joke.

Install Guide

Handbook (amd64)

Okay so I admit, it is a royal pain in the butt to install. The handbook is really wonderful thouh. A few things that I had trouble with up front are

• wifi
• efi
• kernel

but each of these have vaguely simple fixes or workarounds.

As for wifi you just need to be aware that you probably don’t want the gentoo image. A system rescue cd disc image is much better as it has the drivers you need by default. But you can also probably use an old Debian/Ubuntu or Fedora image too, but those are much larger and pointless.

As for the EFI I didn’t put much time into, I just through my machine into legacy bios mode and forgot about it. Sorry.

As for kernel, well that’s a different story. You can use a default kernel with all the goodies, or a build tool like genkernel, but eventually you’ll want to compile your own and just not ahead of time that that is going to be very fun and time consuming. The experts say after a while you’ll get used to it, but I honestly never did so whatever.

Why use Gentoo?

Well if you’re a gamer, than I wouldn’t recommend anything other than good old Microsoft Windows, albeit Steam does work and Wine is miraculous these days, I noticed no performance hits.

Although if you’re a developer and don’t want to screw around with Apple’s Macintosh OS X, then you’ll probably want some sort of linux distribution. Most tools are best here. They take less effort to get to work and will most definitely be magnitudes faster.

Gentoo versus other GNU/Linux Distributions

Contrary to popular belief, Gentoo is most definitely the most STABLE, which is every sysadmin’s dream. Especially when compared to Ubuntu, which is riddled with frivolous bugs, along with the other commonly compared distro, Arch Linux, which is just as bad and even more pointless.
don’t use funtoo, it’s just gentoo without some of the update protocols and a fancy new website.

Now one thing Gentoo is good at is applications, it handles dependencies on a near magical level. It’s natively done in source so you’ll probably have what you need and if not it’s definitely available. On top of that it can also easily handle .deb files and installers from any other system. Really they’re just fancy compiled tarballs optimized for who-knows-what system configuration.

And that leads us to the next topic. Speed. Honestly in most cases it won’t be noticeable. It took me around 2 years to start to feel the difference. For some things it will be hilariously slow, especially webkit (or other heavily graphical frameworks I assume) which takes around 12 hours to emerge. But recently I picked out a recursive mistake in a popular framework affecting about 75% of desktop uses and 50% of mobile users. The way Chrome was compiled wasn’t optimized and by using the infamous USE flags a simple -o2 was gaining around an 8-13% performance increase. This was a v8 (and node) issue and still hasn’t been pushed upstream so Gentoo users are flying across the web that much faster. Don’t get me wrong there are plenty of other places but most of them are negligible if other platforms can handle them to begin with cough Ubuntu. 

Conclusion

My system is surprisingly stable and after windows was starting to feel sluggish this was a great migration leaving my computer feeling indefinitely shiny and new. If you’re on the market for a new linux variation, definately give this one a try. It still gives my school girl shivers of joy and happiness every time it flies through that boot process. Thank you for taking the time to read all of that, and I hope you found it as useful information. 

First problem: Downloading

I’d really probably move back to the legends if it weren’t for this. I can’t ever download it in a reasonable amount of time. Okay sure my internet speed sucks, but the installer sucks worse. It always times out and crashes etc.

Second reason: DotA has an offline mode.

Well this isn’t such a big deal any more since I don’t really travel much; I won’t be for a while but really league needs this please.

DotA is a game.

Some characters are just straight up fun, like not even useful, although they can be game winners. For example lifestealer. He takes control of a minion or creep and makes it explode. I mean really, why do you need to roam around as a single creep? And then when you’re own minion explodes and kills you its nothing more than just hilarious. Then there is Chen who is actually pretty overpowered to be honest. You can recruit your own mob of ancients and wreck some noobs but playing that guy you’re most likely not going to do anything productive. Over all the game is extremely balanced, especially in comparison.

Give it a chance

The goal of our “company” is to establish a solid networking foundation.

Therefore we will be creating digital business cards linking all of your personal information and social media accounts into one plays, allowing you a simple, secure, and easy way to share your contact and establish a network.

Basically, for example, you will give us your Facebook, Snapchat, Kik, Gmail, phone number, or whatever else you feel the need to provide, and will be given an identity that you can share selected services with each people via URL, QR Code, or whatever else is convenient.

The idea is to not start “post your Snapchat threads on Facebook” and instead share via our service which is 100% free and non obtrusive. It also allows you to meet new people with similar interests for all of those that want to be “popular” or whatever we call it these days.

~ Together, let’s become famous ~