I mean, is it really worth it to compile every single program that I install? Wouldn’t that be a waste of time? I am inclined to try it out but on the other hand idk
The irony of the “compiling software on modern hardware isn’t bad at all” argument for Gentoo is that the same hardware hardly benefits from custom compiled software. There was a time when hardware was slow and performance improvements could be made, but that was also back when it took ages to compile software, so there was a trade off of time taken up front for performance during real time usage.
If you want to learn Linux internals, build a system using Linux From Scratch. If you want a system that’s maintainable and highly customizable, run Arch Linux. IMO, Gentoo no longer really has a niche.
If you think performance is the main advantage of Gentoo you have not really used it much. The main advantage is that you have the ability to adjust compile time options to drop huge dependencies or include optional features easily and that all the language environments for development are in excellent shape because the distro developers need them themselves.
So turn my argument around and replace performance with disk capacity. Cost per gigabyte is so low now that you’ll end up spending more money in electricity compiling the dependency out than you would by having the disk space to not worry about it in the first place.
Unless you really, REALLY want to use a decade old PC for whatever reason… then by all means, go for it. Other than that…? Eh…you’ll be “saving” an insignificant amount of memory compared to just installing premade binaries from (any) package manager.
It would indeed be a waste of time. So, no, not worth it.
In the Intel core 2 era I played with doing this and trying to have the kernel and software all optimized and compiled for the specific hardware of the specific computer I was using and the performance gains if any were negligible.
I’d lean towards no.
