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?
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.
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’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!
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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