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Comment by encryptluks2 | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried compiling Linux before? Imagine trying to compile MacOS or Windows. I'd say 3 hours is pretty darn good.

Linux does not take 3 hours even on spinning rust. I'd say one hour at worst. On my computer with the compile happening on an NVMe, it takes about 15 minutes.

Because you're conflating kernel compile times with an entire OS? Linux userspace compilation can take 6+ hours very easily (try yourself with Gentoo).

At Microsoft, our massive servers churn out nightly Windows image overnight usually 5pm-10am next morning.

But that's just the kernel. This is more akin to compiling the kernel plus all packages and applications that make up the operating system.

I clearly rememeber leaving my computer to build during the night, specially when I was crazy enough to experiement with Gentoo.

The Linux kernel takes 15 minutes. Compiling all of Linux (aka the equivalent of Gentoo emerge'ing e.g. gnome-desktop from whole cloth, which is what this is), would not take 15 minutes.

But do you have to emerge the entirety of your system because you added a browser? Since that seems to be how Fuchsia's compile times are working.

It was taking three hours in 1998. Not anymore.

10 years ago, you would be able to compile your whole BSD kernel and userland (plus KDE) in a week or so, while just checking occasionally whether it's completed or not. This was on a dual core, off the shelf desktop computer.

The GP was talking about whole OS, not just the kernel (just as this Fuchsia workstation is too).

A week also seems pretty long for BSD. I'm sure I spun up FreeBSD with Gnome 2 in ~24hours once (it was definitely less than a week because I had a weekend to prepare it for a house party). Though admittedly I didn't compile base. But this was a machine from around 2005 sort of era, maybe even earlier.

I'm not a BSD person. A colleague did it back in the day. This is why I also noted "done leisurely, and without any effort to do it as fast as it's possible", since he said it he compiled it that way, without rush.

Compiling Linux takes under 3 minutes on my workstation. 3 hours is far from pretty darn good.

Kernel only

A full buildroot (incl. Kernel and full toolchain) compile is not much more than that even on my laptop, when using ccache.

Just rechecked because I'm getting down voted. Kernel is 90 seconds, full toolchain and xfce environment is 6 minutes

The default configuration took me 2 minutes and 4 seconds with a 3700X (8 cores).

With the entire base userland, X, Firefox, Gnome etc? Impressive.

We were talking about building Linux, not building Linux + programs to run on it.

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