I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.
Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.
Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.
Nowadays it also has binary packages.
What the point of using Gentoo with Binary packages?
you still get huge amounts of choice and really good tooling
That’s for you to decide.
That would make a huge difference.
I ran Gentoo back in the early aughts; it was hella better than Redhat, but it felt like I was constantly compiling stuff, and new installs and upgrades could sometimes take more than a day. I don’t remember what I jumped to after Gentoo, but I’ve never considered it again because of the lack of prehbuilt binaries. It seemed bitcoinish to have thousands of people wasting CPU cycles compiling the same package when it could be compiled once and redistributed.
Where Gentoo is nice is in the build flags: there’s really no way to get around compiling yourself if you want to exclude optional dependencies, and Gentoo had that in spades. I am just not sure how much that’s actually used anymore, but having binaries gives you the best of both worlds.
Thanks for posting that; I may have to re-investigate Gentoo.
tbh, with modern CPUs it can be a lot easier. especially if you’re a bit picky about your packages and get a binary package for your browser.
Laughs in Windows…
For big packages like browsers and office suites, not all packages.
Still a win if you’re so inclined. I prefer to compile 100%.