To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!
But why? Isn’t building from sources the whole point of Gentoo?
There are Gentoo distros that have binary packages, and Funtoo (a Gentoo-based distro that’s 64-bit only) even suggests using Flatpak for certain software that needs 32-bit resources like Steam. Hell, you can install Flatpak on Gentoo if you want. Gentoo also provided binary packages in the past but only for a few packages (mainly web browsers, but annoyingly not qtwebengine. maybe that’s changed here.)
Gentoo is more about having fine-grained control of your system than anything else nowadays. If that’s what you want, go ahead! For most people, Arch or even something with less control like Ubuntu or Fedora will suffice.
I think I will revert some deviations from the default useflag settings to use the binary versions of some browsers.
For the ability to mix and match. Makes it easy for newcomers.