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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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