Screenshot of QEMU VM showing an ASCII Gentoo Logo + system info
I followed Mental Outlaw’s 2019 guide and followed the official handbook to get up-to-date instructions and tailored instructions for my system, the process took about 4 hours however I did go out for a nice walk while my kernel was compiling. Overall I enjoyed the process and learnt a lot about the Linux kernel while doing it.
I’m planning on installing it to my hardware soon, this was to get a feel for the process in a non-destructive way.
It’s not duplicated work, because it’s optimized for your system and usage. If it was actually duplicated it wouldn’t be any better than Debian plus waiting 20 minutes every time you use apt.
Is your system unique, though? There’s only so much of a processor architectures. And rest of differences seem to be just a fluff to me.
I regularly compile packages with tweaked options for various purposes. Maybe I want a stripped down cURL for container health checks. Maybe I want cURL with HTTP/3 for development against Quic server. Maybe I want to build only the QT6 frontend for freeciv because I don’t need the dependencies that come with GTK.
These are all real examples, from packages that I maintain and use cases that I’ve seen or are my own.
Portage makes doing all of this trivial through the implementation of USE flags; it’s certainly not fluff.
Gentoo still ships a sane set of defaults for when users don’t want / need to change these things, but having the option is fantastic.