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Is gentoo a good choice?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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The irony of the “compiling software on modern hardware isn’t bad at all” argument for Gentoo is that the same hardware hardly benefits from custom compiled software. There was a time when hardware was slow and performance improvements could be made, but that was also back when it took ages to compile software, so there was a trade off of time taken up front for performance during real time usage.
If you want to learn Linux internals, build a system using Linux From Scratch. If you want a system that’s maintainable and highly customizable, run Arch Linux. IMO, Gentoo no longer really has a niche.
If you think performance is the main advantage of Gentoo you have not really used it much. The main advantage is that you have the ability to adjust compile time options to drop huge dependencies or include optional features easily and that all the language environments for development are in excellent shape because the distro developers need them themselves.
So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.
Who said anything about disk capacity?