Hector Martin

If you're doing textmode that should be tolerable on any CPU, but if you want things like desktop environments, web browsers, and office suites, then yeah a Braswell would be quite painful.

FWIW until now I've been doing local builds on my main workstation (i7-3820QM). I have a *lot* of software installed (I mean a ridiculous amount). Takes ~50 hours to recompile it all. Doing monthly world updates was a "leave it overnight" kind of deal.

Now I have a Threadripper 1950X as a dedicated build box (builds packages for all my other Gentoo systems). Takes 14 hours to chew through a full recompile of my workstation's packages. I've scheduled weekly updates for everything and they should mostly be done in a few hours.

Nice, unfortunately i can't afford one of those on a Home Depot budget

Sure, just giving you a benchmark. i7-7740X should be at least 2x faster than my laptop I'm guessing. And Portage has some issues maintaining full parallelism, so the Threadripper goes underutilized (need to debug that). So I think you'll be fine.

yeah i think I'll look into gentoo a bit more after i switch to days at work. definitely intrigued by gentoos package model.

Given the customizability I think it's *very* good. Having some issues is common-ish (especially on unstable with lots of packages) and you'll get used to poking the right knobs to fix them, but given the exponential number of build configs that's an amazing track record.

The dependency model is ridiculously powerful. It has to be, to support all the options. Which is why Portage is pretty slow to resolve dependencies (again, especially once you have as much junk as I do) but it does amazing things these days.