On a more serious note, how does updating apps on gentoo work? I understand that everything is built on your system, but then if the app is updated, do you need to re-compile every time?
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Yes, you recompile each time you update.
In general, to upgrade an app you do:
root # emaint --auto syncroot # emerge --update $PACKAGE_NAME(That first command used to just be something like
root # emerge --syncwhen I last used Gentoo, two decades ago. I wonder why they changed it?)See also: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Upgrading_Gentoo
Wouldnt that take a long time every update? Or are all the horror stories of long compile times just a thing of the past with better hardware now?
A few "whales" are out there, such as browser (engines), rust, certain monolithic office packages and distribution kernel. Those all have -bin alternatives as already mentioned in this thread. The rest will usually be a matter of about half an hour max in my experience.
Well, yeah, but that's what you sign up for when you choose to use Gentoo. Custom-compiling every app, every time, with your chosen USE flags, is the advantage of it. (I suppose Gentoo has "binary packages" available now, but at that point I don't see why you wouldn't just pick Arch instead to begin with.)
Also, that's another reason you should update frequently (e.g. daily or weekly): to keep compilation times reasonable by only ever updating a few packages at once.
Also also, as I said, I last used Gentoo two decades ago. Even back then, I found the compilation times... uh, at least "tractable." π I can only assume that with modern hardware they're not bad at all, as for the most part, processing power has scaled faster than FOSS code complexity.
Thank you for your explanations. Still want to give Gentoo a try some time. Maybe when im done with steam/gaming
I would figure it would be just the opposite: that you'd want to try Gentoo specifically for gaming, in order to wring every last FPS out of the system. At least, that was part of my motivation back in the day (despite Proton not being a thing yet, IIRC I could at least play some games on Linux back then).
I think of Gentoo like the Fast and the Furious-esque customized sports coupe you drive when you're young to try to impress your friends. In contrast, I'm at the point where I can't be bothered anymore, so I drive the boring minivan of distros, Kubuntu. Point is: try Gentoo sooner rather than later, while you still give a shit. (Edit: of course, with a username like @MidsizedSedan, it might already be too late, LOL)
You can give it a try now if you're interested, you should get decent enough gaming performance, though you obviously aren't going to double your fps or anything.
For browsers, you can use binary packages because compiling either firefox or chrome every time there's an update would be an absolute pain.
Then if you use a desktop environment, that's usually the biggest thing when there's an update.
And to be clear - you recompile the packages that are updated, or for which you've changed USE flags (if you add that as a flag in your
emergecommand). You don't recompile the entire system every time. Unless you specify that.I ran it for gaming for 2 years, only stopped because I switched from KDE Plasma to Gnome and broke something, tried to switch back and broke something further. It MIGHT also be that I tried to switch from X to Wayland at the same time instead of doing one thing at a time.