mead
Do you really drink a honey based brew?
There is almost certainly a binary version of gcc in Gentoo. I ran Gentoo for 20 odd years and also generally insisted on compiling everything. I recall gcc going from v3 to 4. My laptop ran for over a week on a glass table with a prop to keep the fan vent unobstructed.
I probably should have learned back then that I didn’t really understand exactly how the toolchain worked and how to get from ebuilds to binary code really works. I’m a sysadmin and not a programmer.
With hindsight, I suggest that you pick your fights with care. Use the bin versions of entire packages where available and enjoy the flexibility of USE when it will make a difference.
gcc is not the biggest lump you will compile but it does take a while. It was rather slower 20 years ago.
Good for you.
I learned a really strange (yet rather obvious in hindsight) lesson a week or so ago. I recently deployed Apache Guacamole at work for webby access to an RDP box with MFA. We are dumping MS’s RDG because it is not very flexible and is really complicated. One of my younger members of staff uses it whilst in the office and are almost pathetically grateful for me setting up the Guacamole thing 8) (WTF).
She’s an Apple aficionado. She can now use her Apple thingie as St Jobs intended and also connect to work stuff, which is largely Windows and Linux based but the Linux stuff is abstracted away to the browser.
The key point is that she considers herself as an Apple person for want of a better word and can be an Apple whilst using our corp MS and Linux gear and it appears to her that it is all integrated.
I’m 53 years old and have been doing IT for around 30 years. We really have to get to grips with how people think and work.