Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo's advantage: 'optimized for your system' -- huh?

[Sebastián Magrí]

El mié, 04-02-2009 a las 11:09 +0100, Jesús Guerrero escribió:
>
>
>
> El Mie, 4 de Febrero de 2009, 0:06, Paul Hartman escribió:
> > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 4:39 PM, Grant Edwards <grante@××××.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Whenever I see a write-up of Gentoo, it's describe as a system
> >> similar to BSD "ports" where you build packages from source. The main
> >> benefit claimed for this approach is that you get better performance
> >> because all executables are optimized for exactly the right instruction
> >> set.
> >>
> >> Where did that bit of apocrypha come from, and why is it
> >> parroted by so many people?
> >
> > I've never done any benchmarks on my system of i386 vs core2 or
> > anything like that... I think the fact that gentoo allows you to control
> > compiler flags which can potentially give you speedups is more of it. But,
> > like you, building from source is kind of a side-effect of Gentoo and not
> > the reason why. Compiling for the sake of compiling is just a waste of
> > time, and that's why a lot of people say "Just use Ubuntu" or whatever.
>
> Not really. Compiling the things gives you control over what
> dependencies will that package have. In a binary distro mplayer
> will usually push like 80 or 800 (I never counted them) packages
> due to the number of features that it potentially has.
>
> If you don't install those, then the ldd info of the binary is
> broken because it can't find the needed object files outside of
> mplayer.
>
> Compiling the packages allow you to tune CFLAGS, ok. But even if
> you think that -most times- this doesn't make a difference, it's
> still worth the trouble compiling it, if only for the sake of
> mplayer not having to depend on 200MB of additional software for it
> to install correctly.
>
> In gentoo, this is as easy as to set your use flags up, and then
> emerge. Easy as hell, and you don't have to go ./configure'ing
> with a dozen parameters every single package in your system,
> because portage takes cares of that.
>
> I absolutely don't care much about the CFLAGS stuff, I just set
> up my -march and forget about it for years. And I think that
> there's a lot of point in using GEntoo, even if you have zero
> interest in compiling sofware there're still a lot of reasons
> why I would use Gentoo over any other Linux.
>
>

Also, Gentoo is a great school. If you want to learn how a Linux system
works, and really want to learn about Unix systems, then Gentoo is the
best for you. The huge knowledge base is one of the things that make
Gentoo as good as it is, and left the users without excuses when they
break the system.

With the power of the CPUs growing every day, the -long time compiling-
idea is becoming irrelevant, this way, I see more benefits on continue
using mi beloved Gentoo and feel users have less excuses to continue
using other distros, but, they are free of choosing, I choose Gentoo
because Gentoo lets me choose...