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Comment by atrettel | Hacker News Reader

At least when I used Gentoo, the point of compiling from source was more about customization than security. I remember having to set so many different options. It was quite granular. Now I just compile certain things from scratch and modify them as needed rather than having an entire system like Gentoo do that, but I do see the appeal to some people.

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This is exactly why I use it where I use it - on my servers. I don’t need to compile X or X support for programs that could have it, because they’re headless.

Nix is another route as far as a compile-from-source package manager with lots of options on many packages.

I feel like most Gentoo folks probably moved over to Nix/NixOS.

The security argument for recompiling from source is addressed by the input addressed (sic) package cache. The customization aspect is mostly covered by Nix package overrides and overlays. You can also setup your own package cache.

I haven't. The Nix language makes no sense to me and there is still nothing akin to useflags. I don't want to override a bunch of packages just to make my system not pull in (e.g.) UI libraries.

Sibling comment aside, I could definitely picture it being a fairly narrow slice of folks who are ideologically motivated enough to choose a niche distro over Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or even Arch, but pragmatic enough to still prefer gentoo over Nix.

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