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Updated
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Performance
By having more control over installed packages and services, you can avoid unneccesary softwares. Furthermore, because of source-based packages installation, you are able to set custom compilation flags to produce fastest possible binaries for your hardware.
Cons
Con Customized package installation can take a long time and cause installation failures
The Gentoo package management system allows you to configure what compilation flags packages should support - i.e. specific processor flag support (SSE, SSE2, etc.), -O1, -O2, -O3 optimization, etc. If you accept one of the default flags, Gentoo downloads binaries from the server. However, if you decide to optimise, it can and will download all source packages and start compiling ALL the programs and libraries on your system. If your chosen flags don't work with a particular library, installation will fail.