I’ve seen this floating around several Gentoo circles: so I thought I’d stoke the fire here
Gentoo added support for binary packages, and now around 80% of Gentoo’s 30,000 packages have binaries available. Do you think it defeats the purpose of using Gentoo to use those packages?
Personally:
No—to me, Gentoo is all about user choice. You’re free to select your init system, your cron daemon, your shell, etc…., I think binary packages just add another layer of customization to that framework.
Plus, who wants to wait 15 hours for GCC to compile?
Do you think it defeats the point of Gentoo to use —getbinpkg?
Completely agree. I actually think binary packages in Gentoo are quite underused, but they can be kind of annoying to actually get sometimes. If your USE flags differ from the upstream binary package, then doing emerge -auvDN @world or other updates causes it to want to rebuild that package from source with your specified flags. In the past I ended up having to sync my USE flags for stuff like GCC and LLVM with the binary package so I would get it to actually stick, which is kind of the point.
But even though Gentoo's binary package management can be awkward, I do agree it's super useful. And Gentoo has so much fantastic tooling around it, and has so many different profiles, that I think using a lot of binpkgs is completely valid. The point of Gentoo isn't to compile shit, it's to give you lots of options. And if you feel like binary packages are what you want or need, then Gentoo providing them is very Gentoo of them.
I also don't think it defeats the purpose. Especially for common use destkops. Today's system are so fast that compiling with the most optimal flags isn't going to be noticeable a change as it used to be. Often for normal use, you are waiting on the storage, or internet. The best part is as the OP said, it's about choice. If that's what you want, 100% do it. I am a very casual user of Gentoo. I use it to test my Hyprland dotfiles or OxWM for example. So not having to compile everything is a time saver for me But now that I've been using it more I do get the appeal