One does not really appreciate pre-built binaries until he has to build a massive code-base [and it takes hours on top-notch hardware, plus a lot of error tweaking].

Thank you to all the open-source supporters that take their time to pre-compile binaries and/or automate builds.

As contributors, they deserve our appreciation as much as developers do.

You are probably not a Gentoo user. ;)

@Oktokolo gento is very good, ... to have installed from bootstrap ... once.

But for regular use, no.

Maybe its better now, but back when I tried it it was to unstable and introduced breaking config changes without warning when updating a package it recommended us to update.

@Voxera
It is stable now (if you don't manually add keywords to get the unstable packages).
But for obvious reasons it still isn't for the common user and will never be.

@Voxera I used Gentoo as my daily driver before and it is the most stable dist I've used. My only issue was compile time on certain larger packages

@matt-jd good to hear.

It used to just remove any unknown settings or simply replace the config file with a default one without any warning. Leaving you to rummage through every single config to verify it was not broken ;)

But it thought me a lot about how the low level installation was done :D

@Voxera sounds familiar but on another distro, maybe there is a bug in a common component

I wanted to add some OBS plugins, had to compile them myself, I gave up after error 7

For Windows and Android, binaries are a MUST because users expect shit to just work without having to rip their asshole out and painting it in neon green.

For Linux, ready-made binaries are rather useless because Linux has no respect for binary compatibility. On the other hand, Linux users don't expect shit to just work anyway so that it's a wash.

@Oktokolo never happened to cross my way! OS's by preference would be OSX - RHEL - Amazon Linux - CentOS - Ubuntu [So you can see I like simple straight forward stuff you don't need much to maintain :P]

@alexbrooklyn I'm doing something actually related! I've been running custom builds on the last couple days of FFMPEG, VLC and now i'm about to end on GStreamer... At this point I probably pushed through 100's of errors. Gotta enable those NVIDIA encoders/decoders... And I'll have to compile some OBS stuff later as well. #PrayForMe. Working with media sucks.

@Fast-Nop Don't forget OSX, binaries are (mostly) the norm too.
I can't remember the last time I had to compile an app for OSX - they're all built, usually with fancy graphic installers - or brew'able.

@whiteagle Apple users are used to sell their grandmother including her jewellery to the devil for new apps, and a graphic installer should certainly be included at that price.

@whiteagle
Here on Gentoo, i am accustomed to ffmpeg and gstreamer just working.
Having a custom build is the default. Compiling is done by the package manager. I can select features by enabling and disabling package tags.

Gentoo may have a steeper learning curve (no graphic installer, full of choices right from the start - so you actually have to read the manual).
But if you often need to use the latest software or compile custom versions - it certainly won't fight you when doing that. It isn't even that hard to have your own local repository containing some obscure package, wich you happen to be the only one needing.
And after installing and configuring your DE of choice, everyday life is mostly like on every other distro.

@Oktokolo it definitively looks good, seems way leaner than most distros out there. Going to try it for sure when I've some time.