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.
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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.
Please don’t be angry with me, but the package manager is called portage;
emergeis just one commandline tool to interact with it.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.