Alt text: A line plot with 2 axis (confidence vs competence) referencing the Dunning-Kruger effect with various distro logos placed at different points on the line. Starts with mint/ubuntu near (0,0) and progressing through multiple distros to end up with opensuse/fedora at what it calls “the plateau of sustainability”
There are a lot of binary packages in Gentoo, for the bigger packages (like LibreOffice), plus you can just use a binary repo if you want. I’ve been on Gentoo a while now, it’s pretty fun and I like all the customization even though I know the relatively minor efficiencies don’t make up for the compile times lol.
Yeah, I know about the binary repositories. I’m running Gentoo as well (on one box with the intention to expand to other machines), but haven’t had occasion to use the official binary repositories yet.
I imagine I’d probably only ever use them if I wanted to install something temporarily. Install LibreOffice, view a file, uninstall. Just seems weird to have one package compiled with different USE flags than the whole rest of the system.
And, the compiler optimizations definitely aren’t why I use Gentoo. Probably more than anything, I’m sick of SystemD. And Gentoo feels a whole lot more “under my control” than Arch. (Arch is great for the most part, don’t get me wrong. I just like what Gentoo has to offer.)
It’s sometimes even a regression. For instance, self-compiled pytorch is way slower than the official releases, and Firefox generally is too unless you are extremely careful about it. Stuff like Python doesn’t get a benefit without patches.
I think the point of Gentoo is supposed to be ‘truly from source’ and utility for embedded stuff, not benchmark performance. Especially since there are distros that offer ‘march’ optimized packages now.