That’s fair, actually: my project had 2 packages in my node_modules (not my package.json, total dependencies!) in vanilla JS, now it has well over 100. Unreal.

I host my own website, and I decided to rewrite the JS portions in React, in order to learn the framework. Boy was it a learning experience: To do the same thing required 2-4 times the amount of code—and that’s just in the scripts, let alone the all the bloat from the packages and the bundler.

I know this is a bit more radical than cutting out frameworks, but working with the JS ecosystem was such a pain, largely because there’s you need to piece together different software to make a stack work, which may or may not go together well. And since your stack is likely unique, good luck getting help on your problems. It made me miss Rust (albeit most languages do)—in Rust, you have Cargo for everything, and it’s beautiful. Rust has its own difficulties, but they actually feel surmountable compared to the dependency hell of JS.

Love this. This is the kind of stuff sophisticated ML models were born to do!

Yeah, Gentoo is really tough to use if you’re not somewhat familiar with Linux, it’s ins and outs, and its general ecosystem. Even the handbook assumes a lot of knowledge. But when you get it operating… boy is it rewarding. It’s like difficult hike—you’re wrung out, but you’re stronger from it in the long-run, and the view is amazing.

You know, I’d recommend starting with Arch, actually. It’s got challenges of its own, but a manual Arch install can help familiarize yourself with the Linux install process in general, and can help ease you into the Linux-from-Scratch-with-training-wheels that is Gentoo. And the documentation (ArchWiki) is famous for how helpful and informative it is. It’s definitely better than the Gentoo Handbook on that front!

It’s not gentoo late, bro!