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!
Non-gentoo user: “Welp, Gentoo is now just another Arch fork LMAO!”
To be fair, you can still build packages and fine-tune the builds with the Emerge system flags, which is sort-of Gentoo’s killer feature. It is just that they have recognized that most people will install probably 99% of all software without changing the default flags, and so why not give them those packages pre-built.
So I guess this make Gentoo more similar to Nix OS or Guix OS but without the high-tech package manager and dependency resolution.
I think it’s a good move. It doesn’t take anything away from people who want to keep compiling everything, but now people on especially old laptops can enjoy the distro too.
Though I will probably continue being a void user this makes me want to use gentoo more then it did before.
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.
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.
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).
Yes, but Chromium is very easy to embed in applications. Mozilla has a history of creating and then abandoning embedding APIs every few years or so (and right now I think they have none).
It seems very hard to embed it anywhere considering everyone doing so forks the whole codebase. Besides, my point was about compile times, embedding APIs shouldn’t take significantly longer to compile.
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).
literally 2 days ago i tried installing gentoo in a vm but gave up because it would take too long to compile… and now this??? guess my timing was pretty bad
if i did use gentoo, i’d probably compile smaller programs from source and bigger things like kernel and web browser i would use as binaries.
Seems kinda pointless to compile most packages unless there are specific performance optimizations or non-default features that can be enabled. I think the way I would use this would be to do binary by default and build only on the occasional instance there is a tangible benefit.
Well we’ve had binary packages for ages for big builds like firerox and default is still to use source packages.
Still I’m really excited for this, having the whole, or big parts of the package tree, will speed up initial installations by a lot on weak arm systems for example. Now initial installation can be done quick and later you could still compile stuff yourself for the full gentoo experience.
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