> 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.

▲ bmenrigh 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. He spent all of his time tweaking compiler flags like -O3 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -funroll-loops and running into so many issues in the process. I think he only lasted about 9 months on Gentoo. To this day, he's the only person I've ever met that was there for performance.

I'm still on Gentoo 22 years later.

	▲	simoncion 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> A friend of mine got me on Gentoo in 2004. Good timing! If memory serves, you missed the Big Libpng Upgrade that either got the concept of Package Slots into Portage or convinced everyone that they were a _really_ good feature to have and use where appropriate.

▲ simoncion 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Unfortunately, this perception of Gentoo remains, and I wish they would remove the verbiage from their site.

Based on what I can see after putting a minute or two into searching, that verbiage being referred to only appears on the About page. [0]

The distro's home page says

  Welcome to Gentoo, a highly flexible, source-based Linux distribution.

and has used those words since at least January 2023 [1]. Its home page has spoken about flexibility and has not spoken about performance since the big redesign in April 2016... seven years prior to the publication of that guy's blog post. [2][3]

And -speaking as a Gentoo user since 2002- neither the user community nor the maintainer community hold the opinion that Ultimate Maxxximum Performance is the distro's goal. Trouble reports that come from "ricers" pretty much always get told "Set your compiler flags to something sane (try '-O2 -pipe' or '-O2 -pipe -march=native') and rebuild. If you can still repro the problem, file a new report because this one is getting closed INVALID.".

And -while the old Gentoo Wiki burned down so I can't prove it- [4] the advice about GCC optimization in the wiki has always cautioned against using aggressive compiler flags and warned that doing so will -among other things- not substantially improve performance. The advice about reasonable compiler flags has pretty consistently been "Use -O2, -pipe, -march=$THE_CORRECT_SETTING_FOR_YOUR_CPU, and maybe -fomit-frame-pointer"... though the "-fomit-frame-pointer" advice has always come with a warning that doing that may make debugging either extremely difficult or impossible, and the "-march" advice the warning that this may make it impossible to run those binaries on another computer.

Anyway. There's only so much you can do to erase an -allegedly- pervasive myth. The fact that some folks have the belief that Gentoo Linux is all about Maxxximum Performance doesn't change the fact that nearly all of the people who use it and -almost certainly- all of the people who maintain it strongly disagree with that claim. The distro is and always has been about flexibility, user choice, and having fun. And it's a nice bonus if building for -say- -march=athlon-xp instead of -march=i586 happens to get you a bit of extra performance here and there.

[0] <https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/about/>

[1] <https://web.archive.org/web/20230101024843/https://www.gento...>

[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20150406115846/https://www.gento...>

[3] That year's April 1 redesign was a bit cool, IMO.

[4] The oldest copy that I can easily find is from mid 2013 [5], so you'll just have to trust me that this has been the long-standing opinion of the overwhelming majority of users and maintainers. While you're there, take a minute or two to skim the prose and notice how it consistently warns against using aggressive compiler flags.

[5] <https://web.archive.org/web/20130829083155/https://wiki.gent...>