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!
Isn’t the reason everyone says they use Gentoo is because of “all the optimisations” but if you’re not compiling for your specific hardware doesn’t that go out the window?
If someone claims to do it for “all the optimizations”, you can immediately assume they are full of shit. If anything, the true gain is the control over the features to compile or not compile into your packages.
I’m also wondering who this is actually for. There’s no shortage of binary distributions, I thought Gentoo’s whole use case was if you want to compile everything.
I can see it working if one wants to customize the compilation flags of a few packages they have strong opinions on, but otherwise don’t care about the rest of the system. Sort of like the binary cache in NixOS, where by default you use the binary cache, but you can customize parts of your system triggering a source-based installation for that parts.
Not necessarily. You probably want to optimize the kernel and a few packages. Then there are some apps where you want to build them with specific features. Then there’s a bunch of stuff that takes forever to build where a binary would be convenient. Flags and optimizations aren’t that important for KDE frameworks or Firefox.
Offering binaries is a really nice middle ground. Gentoo makes it so easy to build custom packages from source but it’s always been all or nothing. I don’t want to wait 2-3 hours building updated libraries or Firefox every time there’s a patch.
Personally, I would be interested in a distro that had binary packages, easy builds like Gentoo and something like Arch’s AUR.