this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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You sure do get benefits, at least in the form of being able to select your compile-time options.
Now, does this always result in a tangible performance difference? Absolutely not. It's more about being able to make decisions like "I don't want
<insert_favorite_software>to be compiled with<insert_least_favorite_options>and I want it all handled by my package manager."How much of a benefit this would be to you or anyone else is worth exploring — at least in my opinion — and a large reason why Gentoo has its own unique role in the larger Linux world.
I was wandering about the benefits for specific apps like browsers.
From my limited experience, most compiled updates are finished pretty quickly. The only exception are huge binaries, so a ThinkPad literally takes hours to compile Firefox.
Any benefit — whether that be smaller overall binary size, reduced system requirements, removed dependencies on unneeded libraries, etc. — would be entirely dependent on the machine and what
USEflags you're messing around with. I can't really be more specific without knowing your exact hardware configuration and needs. You would have to know what features Firefox has that you explicitly don't need and are available as flags, then you could start shaving your yak.I can, however, say that in all my time using Gentoo I installed Firefox from source maybe a half-dozen times, and it was always just to test out the upgrade from one CPU to the next. I don't really need to trim all of the fat out of Firefox in most cases, so if I felt like I needed a really light GUI browser I'd probably just grab
dilloornetsurf.Yes, compiling modern browsers from source on a laptop will probably take a few hours. Same thing with
rustand the usual suspects. This is, of course, where binary packages are not only useful but indispensable.The benefits one could potentially gain from compiling something like a browser are often outweighed by practicality. Then again, a counter to that argument could be something along the lines of "you don't have to sit there and watch it compile, you could be doing something else."
Are the benefits of compiling from source noticeable for modern hardware or slightly last gen hardware? Like, a last generation Ryzen 5900x with NVidia 3070 GPU (my current setup).
I know compile flags definitely have an effect, I just don't know how dramatic a difference there would be.
It certainly can be noticeable, depending on where and at what you're looking. The issue can be that making a general "yes, you'll see a difference" statement is usually difficult; opinions of what counts as "a difference" vary wildly from person to person.
What you experience could be as small as shaving a few KiB off your executable or getting an extra 2-3 FPS in a game all the way up to "it just won't work unless I compile it this specific way because of <insert_variable>."