portage-bashrc-mv VS gentoo

> Sadly, and as far as I can tell, x32 is pretty much abandonware today. Gentoo claims to support it but there are no official builds of any distribution I can find that are built in x32 mode.

It is supported, but the list of broken packages for that arch is rather long... [1]

You don't need an official build, as Gentoo builds itself and also cross-builds itself for any target and any ABI. In this case, you don't even need a cross-build.

Just install Gentoo x86_64 multilib, enable x32 support in kernel, enable abi_x86_x32 USE flag* for the packages you want to test and run emerge to build them. They won't even interfere with the rest of the running system. See [2].

[1] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/profiles/arch/a...

[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Multilib/Concepts

Still, if you include transitive dependencies you end up with a total of 90 dependencies[0] which is unheard of in systems programming. This for some reason includes stuff like "winapi-i686-pc-windows-gnu" which really has no place for a set of linux software tools.

[0]:https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/blob/master/sys-fs/bcachefs...

Whilst Firefox may support hardware video decoding, Mesa since March 2022 disables patent encumbered codecs by default[1], and distributions such as Fedora and OpenSuse do not explicitly enable these patent encumbered codecs to avoid possible legal problems. Even Gentoo (built from source code by the user) requires the user to explicitly enable a USE flag (proprietary-codes) to use patent encumbered codecs.[2]

The thought process is that AMD, NVIDIA, Intel and the likes are not providing a patent license with their hardware.[3] They are instead just supplying part of an overall system that together with operating system kernel, display manager software, video player software, etc allows the decoding and encoding of patent encumbered video files. Open source software projects and distributions are concerned they'd be found to be infringing patents by enabling a complete solution out-of-the-box. Hence they put some hurdles in place so that a user has to go out of their way to separately piece together the various parts to form a complete system capable of encoding and decoding patent encumbered codecs.

[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/15...

[2] https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/1265a159743d7f07185a...

[3] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]...

Thank you! I don't live in git and this helps! Normally under gentoo I shouldn't have to. This actual git https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo (as opposed to the gentoo browser view) plus this "checkout the commit" should get me much further. ... And probably deserve some space in the gentoo docs.

You choose - here's a list