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!
Outside of the whole compiling from source thing, What are selling points of Gentoo over Arch?
Seems most Gentoo users I’ve ran into are either diehards about compiling their own packages or they’ve simply used it for over a decade and are super familiar with it.
Been using Gentoo on my server for over a decade now and probably won’t ever leave the compiling front, especially with a 12-core/24-thread CPU making it go as quick as regular binary updates on my mint laptop… But that being said, in happy to see them considering to do this. It’ll bring in some folks who are afraid of (or just dislike) compiling everything from source. I think the biggest packages that’d benefit from this are definitely the browsers and desktop environments.
This is what Gentoo needed. I’ve been using it for a long time and love it as it is but sometimes when there’s a bunch of slot conflicts or a compile error it makes me wish I just dealt with binaries instead. Now that we have the best of both worlds, it will make Gentoo appeal to a wider userbase and make it less painful to use on older hardware.
I’ve been a Gentoo user since 2004 or so and used to crosscompile binaries in like 2006 for all of my systems including some sparc and ppc builds on my main servers. It was glorious. I adore Gentoo for portage and the ability to dream up a set of OS decisions and then actually do it, dog food and all. I’ll probably never not have some form of a Gentoo system within reach but mostly for nostalgic reasons but VMs and containers now fill my needs.
I’m enthralled by this. It really makes it easier to support other people’s gentoo installations while allowing one to still optimise the ever last drop of life blood out of one’s own packages! Love to see it!
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.
Love this change. I wonder if I can install a binary-based Gentoo distro and gradually progress from there, if I wanted to, with locally compiled packages that partially replace the binaries. I hope this is not an all-or-nothing situation, so better read the announcement.
The official binhost project has been an experimental thing until now, I’ve personally been using it for the year on multiple machines, but it’s not been something that you can just enable. And it’s definitely not been something that’s come pre-prepared in the stage 3.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I stopped using Gentoo because compiling everything was a major waste of time, but I have missed world files since then. This is a great reason to reconsider Gentoo for my next machine.
Can the file be split into different files like in Gentoo? I used to have different files for basic stuff, gaming, hardware specific, etc, so I could keep the parts of the Configs I wanted from one machine to another.
If so I’ll definitely check it out, been meaning to try Alpine since for what I understand it’s not GNU, right? Which should put a final nail in the GNU+Linux copy pasta hahahah.
I don’t think apk would check multiple files for the world. But you could maintain them outside the apk mechanisms, just concatenating them into a single file, with tup/make/sh/whatever.
Makes sense, I actually have a tool for that sort of thing that I wrote for i3 configs (it’s called CFC and it’s here in case you want to use it gitlab.com/Nibodhika/cfc )
Alpine Linux is the most sane distro I tried. The absence of glibc brought limitations unfortunately, but it is the fault of developers that uses that shit instead of pure libc.
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