Maybe it's time to grow up and download binary builds like a normal person. I had my 'let's compile the linux kernel from source for 3.5% hypothetical performance gains' phase but you can't expect professional devs to cater to source-obsessed hobbyists

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t43562 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

There's a long history of people telling Linux users "to grow up" and "do what normal people do."

Linux wouldn't exist if people submitted to that argument.

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throwawayy6767 27 minutes ago | parent [-]

The vast majority of desktop Linux users run Ubuntu (initial motto: Linux for human beings). So one may argue the literal opposite of what you wrote, in that if Canonical didn't invest into making a Linux distro that's accessible to normal people, it wouldn't have the relevance it now does. On top of that, Linux has (or had) a number of clear advantages over Windows that dwarf the presumed upsides of compiling everything from source vs. downloading builds.

There's not much of an argument for adopting obscure niche practices for their own sake

	▲	t43562 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Linux was obscure and niche for a very long time before Ubuntu existed and Ubuntu only existed because someone bothered to use and develop Linux when it wasn't normal. The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work. Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....

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bmenrigh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I doubt this oft-repeated stereotype was every particularly accurate. I'm not aware of any current Gentoo users on the distro specifically for performance reasons. Gentoo users are in it for control over their system and customization.

	▲	BeetleB an hour ago \| parent [-]
		https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2023/May/20-years-of-gentoo/#an... > In the early days, there was much promotion of Gentoo as being “faster”, because you could compile everything based on your particular processor, etc. And you could increase the optimization level for a boost. Their web site still touts this as a reason to use Gentoo. > In reality, the performance is more or less the same as on any other distribution. The folks who stick to Gentoo tend not to care about performance as much. Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.

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woodruffw an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Gentoo’s decision to support source builds seems eminently reasonable to me, and I don’t think we should reward it with condescension.

The bigger problem, to me, is that it’s not really clear why this is actually a problem for Gentoo. I am glad they perform user-facing source builds, however, because they see things that other distributors don’t.

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Cyph0n an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or adopt the Nix approach of caching common binary artifacts in a content addressable store and rebuild from source only when needed.

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BeetleB 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Time to grow up and use Windows like a normal person. The bulk of professional work is done on Windows.

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lostapathy an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Gentoo made a lot of sense WAY back in a pre-docker world, where you had to run the whole world on the host OS. Being able to compile it all meant you could link it all together with whatever weird combination of optional libraries you wanted. Things like getting sendmail to auth over LDAP, that nobody packaged in the base distro, become possible. And with Gentoo's tooling, you could build a coherent distro to your own unique demands.

Now though? It's way easier to have a herd of unicorn docker containers running that each handle one weird thing in isolation.

	▲	weinzierl an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The herd of docker containers would in practice share almost nothing apart from the kernel and waste a lot of RAM. Didn't matter when RAM was cheap, but nowadays...