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Frosty Piss [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/03/gentoo_starts_offering_binaries/ [theregister.com]

I'm not one of these Nancy-Boys who just downloads some binaries and call it an operating system. I compiled my Gentoo, right here on my own computer, but now that's history.

In what many thought might be a prank, The geeks at Gentoo announced they will now offers 20-plus gigabytes of pre-compiled binaries, from desktops to office suites, to speed up installations and updates.

Although this is exactly how basically all other current Linux distributions work, it is a significant departure for Gentoo, which previously was an almost entirely source-based distro. With Gentoo, the install disk that gets you started must by definition be pre-compiled, up to now, when you install Gentoo, it fetches the source code and compiles it on your machine for your machine, specifically optimized for your computer's specific CPU and the individual functionality and configuration you chose.

For now, the full range of pre-compiled binary packages will focus on x86-64 and Arm64.

Original Submission