Comment by tgtweak

I used to run gentoo like 14 years ago! It remains one of the fastest distros I've seen for the specific hardware it was running on (high core count 4-socket AMD opteron servers) and I mostly attributed that to the fact it was compiling everything (even the base os in this case!) for that specific CPU at install time... emerge would build/compile and if you set your USE flags correctly it produced heavily tailored and optimized binaries. I feel like a staged/graduated (downloading/running precompiled initially while a flag-optimized compile runs in the background) would be a good way to get around some of the downsides here (namely that it takes 45 minutes to install firefox with emerge/pacman and that builds fail more often than packages fail to install).

Very cool to see that it's still going strong - I remember managing many machines at scale was a bit of a challenge, especially keeping ahead of vulnerabilities.