Comment by optionalsquid
3 years ago
Gentoo has a special place in my heart as one of the earliest distros I used and one that I ended up using for many years. Days were spent compiling packages. I'm still fond of the documentation, package system, and init system, among other things, though I have switched to distros that require less effort.
It was also the distro I used when I first started contributing to an OSS project. And it was the reason why that project eventually added filters to limit what CXXFLAGS were used, since we got tired of having to debug weird bugs caused by crazy combinations of GCC flags:
https://www.shlomifish.org/humour/by-others/funroll-loops/Ge...
And yes, I also went through a phase of having tens of options in CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS. Good times.
Haha, I remember looking for the most aggressive optimization settings, not understanding them and then finding my system was stable for all of 20mins after boot. It was a lot of fun when I was young and had lots of time to pour into that sort of thing.