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by dochtman·12y ago·view on hn ↗
Gentoo is awesome. I'm a big fan of the amount of control it affords me over what it installs (i.e. it allows really focused, minimal base installs), and I generally find the package manager really nice to work with (definitely nicer than yum, or even brew). To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome.

Note also that e.g. CoreOS and ChromeOS (or are those the same these days?) are built on Gentoo technology IIUC.

Thanks to all the developers who helped put this release together!

1 comments
To be fair, I only use it on servers; I could imagine having to compile Gnome or KDE is a little more bothersome.

I feel the same about Gentoo, but my approach to desktops and servers is the opposite. If my laptop or desktop breaks during a Gentoo upgrade, it's an interesting learning experience (after much gnashing of teeth and shaking of fist). If a server breaks during an upgrade that's a business impacting outage. So I prefer to run Red Hat or CentOS on servers despite distinct lack of awesome latest packages.

I never bothered with a Gnome or KDE desktop. Compiling XFCE, Firefox and Chromium takes long enough.

KDE takes about 30 hours to compile on my core i7-4790k even threading it out to all 8 threads.
That is too long. On my i7-3630QM laptop it takes about six hours or less. I haven't seen KDE (with almost all use flags enabled) take 30 hours since 2006 on my Pentium 4 and I have emerged every major and minor update since then. Even on Pentium 4 I think the usual emerge duration was around 18 hours most of the time.
I think I maybe counting KDE's dependencies into that figure. Not just KDE alone.
Interesting. I'm running a mix of i3wm and some Gnome apps on a relatively old Intel P8700 powered laptop and the only compile pain points are browsers and libreoffice (I ended up using the -bin package).
Portage supports installing binary packages from a binhost, as well. Most large packages (Firefox, Chromium, LibreOffice, etc.) have precompiled versions that follow the naming convention of $SOURCEPKGNAME-bin.