To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! And read on for more details!
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Quite the statement that Gentoo has survived for so long compiling from source but, even with ever advancing processor speeds, they’ve finally gone "Nah… Takes to long. ".
I mean, I don’t blame them. Yesterday I left my machine building a PyTorch package for 4 hours on a 12 core processor.
As a long-time Gentoo user the only packages where compile times (and RAM usage) really bother me are all the myriad of forks of that shitty Chrome browser engine (webkit-gtk, QtWebEngine, chromium,…) and LLVM and clang.
I once shredded an sdcard-as-home while trying to compile firefox. This is why i say the web is broken. Needs a fucking kernel++ to display webpages.
To be fair USB sticks and SD cards seem to fail when you stare at them a bit too intensely. I think it has been at least a decade since I bought a USB stick for OS installations that lasted for more than three installs (each a few months apart at least since the need does not arise that often).
Ok, i usually go for speedy ones, a bit more expensive, maybe they have better chips.
I once read, some higher quality USB sticks even have SSD style wear leveling. While cheap sticks have the worst quality flash (good q for SSD, medium for SD an ‘barely usable’ for sticks).
To think the day Gentoo goes binary would finally come…
Next: Slackware get automatic dependency resolution
Well we’ve had binary packages for ages for big builds like firerox and default is still to use source packages.
Still I’m really excited for this, having the whole, or big parts of the package tree, will speed up initial installations by a lot on weak arm systems for example. Now initial installation can be done quick and later you could still compile stuff yourself for the full gentoo experience.
I’m enthralled by this. It really makes it easier to support other people’s gentoo installations while allowing one to still optimise the ever last drop of life blood out of one’s own packages! Love to see it!
But why? Isn’t building from sources the whole point of Gentoo?
For the ability to mix and match. Makes it easy for newcomers.
There are Gentoo distros that have binary packages, and Funtoo (a Gentoo-based distro that’s 64-bit only) even suggests using Flatpak for certain software that needs 32-bit resources like Steam. Hell, you can install Flatpak on Gentoo if you want. Gentoo also provided binary packages in the past but only for a few packages (mainly web browsers, but annoyingly not qtwebengine. maybe that’s changed here.)
Gentoo is more about having fine-grained control of your system than anything else nowadays. If that’s what you want, go ahead! For most people, Arch or even something with less control like Ubuntu or Fedora will suffice.
literally 2 days ago i tried installing gentoo in a vm but gave up because it would take too long to compile… and now this??? guess my timing was pretty bad
if i did use gentoo, i’d probably compile smaller programs from source and bigger things like kernel and web browser i would use as binaries.
Seems kinda pointless to compile most packages unless there are specific performance optimizations or non-default features that can be enabled. I think the way I would use this would be to do binary by default and build only on the occasional instance there is a tangible benefit.
Wouldn’t the larger ones be the ones you’d get the most benefit from compiling?
Not really I think optimizing it gives you small performance gains.
I think it’s a good move. It doesn’t take anything away from people who want to keep compiling everything, but now people on especially old laptops can enjoy the distro too.
Though I will probably continue being a void user this makes me want to use gentoo more then it did before.
So… Bentoo? Bintoo?
For the uninitiated, does “gen” imply source/compilation somehow?
That weirdly makes me wanna try it less. That was it’s whole thing. It’s a convenient thing tho
Why “less”? Gentoo is about choice, you can still compile all packages, this just gives you the option to install binaries if you prefer that.
Hm? Didn’t they already offer binary packages for a while now?
The official binhost project has been an experimental thing until now, I’ve personally been using it for the year on multiple machines, but it’s not been something that you can just enable. And it’s definitely not been something that’s come pre-prepared in the stage 3.
Isn’t the reason everyone says they use Gentoo is because of “all the optimisations” but if you’re not compiling for your specific hardware doesn’t that go out the window?
If someone claims to do it for “all the optimizations”, you can immediately assume they are full of shit. If anything, the true gain is the control over the features to compile or not compile into your packages.
I’m also wondering who this is actually for. There’s no shortage of binary distributions, I thought Gentoo’s whole use case was if you want to compile everything.
I can see it working if one wants to customize the compilation flags of a few packages they have strong opinions on, but otherwise don’t care about the rest of the system. Sort of like the binary cache in NixOS, where by default you use the binary cache, but you can customize parts of your system triggering a source-based installation for that parts.
that makes it usable! might give it a try.
Wait, didn’t Gentoo have a binary cache? I seem to remember many years ago that I used one…
