I personally run Gentoo on my ancient Acer Aspire One, because I'm a little crazy, and run it on everything: my desktop, raspberry pi's, an old Surface tablet. I want to install it onto a Pine-Phone next! It's wide architecture support is one of my favorite features, among many. That said, I clicked this article with no expectations of seeing it in the list, and was really surprised when it was (NixOS too :p).
Not that Gentoo isn't great for old or otherwise underpowered hardware, it absolutely is, but.. the build times! It'd be a real pain to keep things up to date without the system I've fallen into.
I run all these older systems thanks to virtual (sometimes cross-architecture) binary package hosts on my beefy PC, and automating the process of syncing world files, use flags, binpkgs, etc. Any of my gentoo machines can automatically sync their settings with their package host, trigger builds of updated packages, and download the resulting binaries, all of which is packaged into a simple-to-run update script. In the future, I hope to add another script which parses portage output and just sends the package list to the binhost, which can then build them one-shot mode and not worry about keeping world lists and profiles synced up, just use-flags and repo trees.
Anyways, simple to run now, but getting here was a long, gradual process, which I didn't start until I was already doing these steps, intermittently, by hand for several devices.
The alternatives include:
- Compiling everything locally on my netbooks and such, which would take an absurdly inconvenient amount of time (if none of the builds fail for lack of memory) on a regular basis.
- Actually building the system on my PC, and then moving the drive to the under powered device, which may need to involve a VM if cross-architecture (like this gem https://youtu.be/4qSziR6sD8Q)
- distcc, which (a.) would still be awfully slow no matter how many cores I get behind it because of preprocessing work, and (b.) I actually do run distcc servers alongside the package hosts, mostly just for kernel builds.
Digression: I've only automated the steps needed for basic distcc distribution of kernel builds (without -pump), and although it helps a little, I still prefer to manually sync the kernel src and it's config with the binhost and build the kernel image there, which I'll build a smoother system for in the future.
Point being, I love Gentoo, and as much of a hassle as this might sound, I do this! It is worth it to me. (I also run all these systems LTO, because I'm just full of myself: I justify it by arguing that the, kind of diminishing-returns-esque, performance advances of Gentoo which can usually be disregarded as inconsequential make the most difference, if any, on underpowered devices.)
But.. I don't know that I'd recommended anyone else do this. It's been a lot of work. I don't know what it would be like if I just built all my packages locally, but I've tried building gcc updates on my netbook, god forbid I try to built Firefox (which to be fair is available as a bin in the repos). I think I'd rather just stop updating (not an option!). I hope that someday the scripts I'm maintaining to keep this all working will be streamlined enough that I can share them with pride, and recommended everyone run gentoo on their old laptops and such, but atm they rely too heavily on my personal infrastructure.
By all means, I love this distro and I hope everyone tries it. Don't be scared off by me, I'm crazy, and the complexity of my system only exists because I do this to myself. For one machine, even if it's only decently powerful (like an older but 64-bit laptop), Gentoo might be a solid choice, and can be a great experience. But know what building everything locally entails, and what other options are available.
(I don't know who I'm talking to, no "beginner" seems to be seriously planning on installing gentoo on underpowered hardware based on this article, and folks who are seem to be like me, and know what they want and why their doing it; guess I'm just sharing :p)