Gentoo Linux, the distribution that is famously source-based, has announced the availability of more than 20GB of binary packages on its servers.

Gentoo’s claim to fame is its source-based nature, meaning the majority of applications and packages are built from source whenever the user installs something. While time consuming, this approach has the benefit of ensuring an application is tailored for the specific hardware profile it’s installed on.

Gento has supported mixing and matching binary (pre-built) packages for some time, but the distro maintainers are now maintaining more than 20GB of binary packages on their servers in an effort to lower the barrier to entry for users that have slower hardware.

You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed?

To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates – not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy!

The announcement is good news for Gentoo fans. More information here.