hi;

i currently use arch as my main system (u gotta love pacman )
but i have read quite a bit about gentoo and while i understand the aims of the distro: i am not sure about how worthwhile it is.

my question is this: what advantages do you get from waiting hours for everything to compile? i would unlikely want to change how anything compiles very much: so what is it you get? better speed? more than arch?

thanks

Seriously, if you have modern hardware the puny human mind isn't going to comprehend the difference in speed between one well-maintained distro and another.

More customisability is what I get from Gentoo over Arch. I used Arch for awhile and it is a good distro, but I have this perverse need to decide for myself what dependencies to build everything against. I used to do it with LFS and CLFS, but that started taking too much of my time hunting down and fixing build errors. With Gentoo, I get the micro-management I like and someone else gets to create all the patches.

The initial Gentoo installation can take a little while especially if you plan to install X and a DE. After that, you're not installing that much, just package upgrades. Those can build and install in the background while you continue to work. Of course, I have six machines and use distcc so that may be why things build a little faster for me .

ok i must try gentoo some time then

but that second part: how exactly are you using distcc? it sounds very intriguing...