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For anyone wondering, when you install Gentoo, you untar a stage3.tar.gz into a / that you chrooted into. That tar file contains a precompiled environment and toolchain. From there most things get compiled.

For example "emerge x11-base/xorg-x11" would install X and related utilities, but you wouldn't do that. X is a dependency, what you really want is whatever desktop environment you like. So "emerge qtile" and the rest is handled. The compilation time thing isn't a big issue on any reasonable solid state hardware, and there are precompiled packages available for large popular projects (like office suites).

Install instructions: https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64#

Did you make sure to triple compile the compiler for optimal speed?

If you only care about how fast the system will be, you only need to compile the compiler twice, not thrice. Probably that is his problem and why it's taken him 7 years so far. He should have compiled the compiler thrice...

I wrote scripts that build from scratch to my custom desktop configuration in < 8 hours using Packer on a single i7. I'm also toying with the idea of a buildserver that creates precompiled binaries :)