Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.
You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.
When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.
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.
I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.
Nowadays it also has binary packages.
What the point of using Gentoo with Binary packages?
Still extremely customizable, and peerless rolling release features.
You can mix and match stable and bleeding edge packages very easily and switch at any time.
When packages make breaking changes, Gentoo will warn you and guide you through the migration before you update and only if you have the affected package installed.
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.
For big packages like browsers and office suites, not all packages.
Still a win if you’re so inclined. I prefer to compile 100%.
Not so! General binary support was added quite recently.
🤯
Well… kinda takes the edge off… i’ll stick to compiling.
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.
I dunno. I have a fair number of packages installed from AUR, and the Rust ones take forever to compile. CPUs may have gotten faster, but some popular languages have gotten much slower to compile.
Packaging rust is terrible, compiling rust is terrible. How can it be this awful? Why is the rust compiler so terrible?
I’ve become a rust hater because of this