That’s kind of the point of Gentoo. Though it’s not as hard as it sounds, the package manager (emerge) pretty much does it for you. It just might take a while.
They’ve had individual -bin versions of a few big builds, like firefox, chromium, and libreoffice for basically forever.
They had something called distcc for a long time too. That let you, the user, cross-compile packages on one machine for installation on different machine(s).
But at the end of 2023, they dramatically expanded the system, adding configuration machinery to install $packagename from source or binary (i.e. not like firefox and firefox-bin). And they set up the server infrastructure to host a much larger number of official binary packages for amd64 and arm64. Around the same time they added a “distribution kernel” as an ebuild, so users no longer had to “compile it yourself”. And I think the dist-kernel is now available as a binary.
Please, tell me they don’t have to compile everything.
They don’t have to. They GET to.
deleted by creator
They actually don’t but it is the way programs are installed on gentoo by default.
Compiling Firefox on my old ThinkPad took 9 hours
That’s kind of the point of Gentoo. Though it’s not as hard as it sounds, the package manager (emerge) pretty much does it for you. It just might take a while.
deleted by creator
No problem, tried Gentoo like once over 5 years ago. It was cool and fun but not a daily driver for me.
Gentoo has optional binary packages now.
Now is like 10 years if not more, no?
They’ve had individual -bin versions of a few big builds, like firefox, chromium, and libreoffice for basically forever.
They had something called distcc for a long time too. That let you, the user, cross-compile packages on one machine for installation on different machine(s).
But at the end of 2023, they dramatically expanded the system, adding configuration machinery to install $packagename from source or binary (i.e. not like firefox and firefox-bin). And they set up the server infrastructure to host a much larger number of official binary packages for amd64 and arm64. Around the same time they added a “distribution kernel” as an ebuild, so users no longer had to “compile it yourself”. And I think the dist-kernel is now available as a binary.
We don’t. We can decide between binary packages and compiling.