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!
Quite the statement that Gentoo has survived for so long compiling from source but, even with ever advancing processor speeds, they’ve finally gone "Nah… Takes to long. ".
I mean, I don’t blame them. Yesterday I left my machine building a PyTorch package for 4 hours on a 12 core processor.
As a long-time Gentoo user the only packages where compile times (and RAM usage) really bother me are all the myriad of forks of that shitty Chrome browser engine (webkit-gtk, QtWebEngine, chromium,…) and LLVM and clang.
I once shredded an sdcard-as-home while trying to compile firefox. This is why i say the web is broken. Needs a fucking kernel++ to display webpages.
To be fair USB sticks and SD cards seem to fail when you stare at them a bit too intensely. I think it has been at least a decade since I bought a USB stick for OS installations that lasted for more than three installs (each a few months apart at least since the need does not arise that often).
Chrome takes so much longer than the kernel somehow. There’s also the occasional package that makes you build single-threaded because nobody has fixed some race condition in the build process.
More importantly Chrome takes so much longer than Firefox even though they essentially do the same things (or 95% the same things if you are nitpicky).
My beef tends to be with software out of FANGs. Big teams and huge codebase to match. Completely inpetetrable for the rest of us and, I suspect, far more code then there should be.