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

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#

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 :)

I used to have a poetteringware mask, but I had to let pulseaudio slide (but without udev and systemd (eudev works well)) because I couldn't find support for my non-standard setup anywhere for alsa.

Your point is super valid and it makes me sad, I donate/try to support as much as I can but the amount of developers that are apatheic to niche cases is increasing day by day.

There is apulse this which I used successfully in the past, it’s included in the portage tree. Since I happen to like systemd itself, I don’t have much of an issue with that. I used to avoid pulseaudio and networkmanager, but on my latest installation on a laptop I just included them and they are working fine for now. We’ll see how long they survive this time, esp NetworkManager is starting to bother me again ;)

12 years here. I finally let pulse back on my system a year or two ago when after enough upgrades (notably Firefox) my sound config went from perfectly fine for years to unreliable. At least pulse is better now. And more stable than the version I have to use on work machines (ubuntu). No dependencies on systemd required, though, that project will never be installed. OpenRC is great, and it's simple enough that it doesn't need any team of paid devs figuring out how to cram more features into it.

For Firefox, I recommend using sndio.

I'm surprised to hear of problems with Firefox and ALSA. On all my Gentoo machines I simple compile Firefox with USE="-pulseaudio" which sets --enable-alsa within Firefox's build. Still working fine up to and including Firefox 66 directly to ALSA.